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