I wrote letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was draw more 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 does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the 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 age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were to it was not only rising incomes but also a key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is cut that 10 million in half again. And I that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s a few diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we 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. actually 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 in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, 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 where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get 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. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, malaria — the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that can’t get the economies in these areas going because just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could 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) mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it is the mother and child stay under the bed net night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths 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 evolves and the mosquito evolves. So tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar up again. And the world has gone through this it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should save two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how get not just 70 percent of the people to the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give 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, 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 understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is 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 drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning the education that the balance of people are getting. Not has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. we have to change this. We have to change so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if 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, do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will the performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years would be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and 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 look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, a 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 pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is with being a better 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 some people who very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or encourage the people with it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with high turnover.
Now, there are a few places — few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable 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 their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re engaged 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 high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school 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 it have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that 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 number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them 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 that brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, think there are some clear things we can do.
First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers sit 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 kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And could all sit and work together on those problems. You can the very best teachers 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 that a kid could out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have 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 only available just on the Internet, but you could make it so DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about — the place that this is going on — that 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 everyone 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 it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, it was taken out in the Senate because there are people are threatened by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, at the very name of these things. And the sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)