I wrote a letter last week talking the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and it kind of an annual thing. A goal I there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because think there are some very important problems that don’t worked on naturally. That is, the market does not the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as we to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it be solved. And part of the reason I feel way is looking at the past. Over the past century, lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those 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 reduction of the death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we see 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. So 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 what caused until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death 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 see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a 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 one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because it 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 roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. 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 that we’ve ever had in past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you into a country with the right tools and the right way, you it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a 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 alone doesn’t give the road map. Because the road map to get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in 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 turn to a second question, a different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How you make a teacher great? It seems like the of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some teachers. We 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. I had teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers 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 the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to on 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 you look at the economy, really is only providing opportunities now to people with better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids finish high school. And that had been covered up a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority 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 going to jail than you do of getting four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was very key thing. And we hooked up with some people how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between 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 and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the of this top quartile? What do they look like? might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This takes four different factors and says how much do they teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay 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 to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math 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 and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do 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 very high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in schools is very 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 to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s bizarre. I sat 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 or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it 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 compare to a normal 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 number of times the principal can come into the — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed 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 think there are some clear things can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given the picture of where we are. And that allows us understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit 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 kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching 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 a kid who’s behind, you would know you could 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 to DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important to get right for the country to have as strong a future it should have. In 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 are people who are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it 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 brilliant people like you to these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)