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