I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal had there was to draw more people in to on those problems, because I think there are some important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can 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 I am an optimist. tough 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, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.
And key reason we were able to it was not rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. example, measles was four million 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 that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop deadly 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 only disease we can see that people who lived Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was 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. other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the zones, which is where the rich countries are. So can 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 gotten most the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s around the equator.
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why priority has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few things. We’ve got 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 those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be careful because — the 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 two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria shrinking. Or, if 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 up again. the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t give us road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate 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 seems like kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, 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 the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 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 and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but more concerning is the education that the balance of people getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And you look at the economy, it really is only opportunities now to people with a better education. And have to change this. We have to change it that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always took the rate as the number who started in senior year and compared to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated rate as soon as that tracking was done to 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever 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 had a good effect. But the we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, entire difference between us and Asia would go away. four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. 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 look like? You might think these 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 back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four 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 works is there’s things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to what that is and to draw it in and replicate it, to 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 answer is, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set 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 goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools 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 sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s 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 sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids 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 engaged and the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position 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 how they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And 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 can only come down here once year, but 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 improve doesn’t have the to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the data. For example, New York passed a law 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 the 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 given the picture of where we are. And that allows us to who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a 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 not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you 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 thing get right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s — the House version actually had money in it for 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 think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a 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. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make 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 to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)