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