I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some very problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into I want to admit that I am an optimist. tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because malaria — the evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say important. And this is: How do you make a great? It seems like the kind of question that would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is the education that the balance of are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it limit the number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come here once a year, but you need to let know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said the teacher improvement data could not be made available and in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all and work together on those problems. You can take the best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and really think that education is the most important thing get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it taken out in the Senate because there are people who threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)