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