I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more in to work on those problems, because I think there some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, governments to do the right things. And only by paying to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw people in can we make as much progress as need to.
So this morning I’m going to share two of problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, 20 million of those died 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 childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it was only 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 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a diseases that 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, which is how do we stop a deadly that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe for thousands of years. In fact, if we look the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A disease. It was in the United States. It was Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the 1900s, when a British military man figured out that was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where rich countries are. So 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 leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why 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 you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds 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 are not infected.
So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened in a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But have to be careful because malaria — the parasite and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you up with two choices. If you go into a with the right tools and the right way, you do vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a months. And that should save over two thirds of the 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 communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to 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 come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be to eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn to a question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. this is: How do you make a teacher great? seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s 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, the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly teachers in a narrow set of places. So the 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. those top 20 percent have been the best in world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those 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. if you look at the economy, it really is providing 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 so that country is strong and stays at the forefront of that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.
When I learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish school. And that had been covered up for a long because they always took the dropout rate as the who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t where the kids were before that. But most of dropouts had taken place before that. They had to the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income the United States, you have a higher chance of to jail than you do 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 had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between and Asia would go away. Within four years we would blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this quartile? What do they look like? You might think these be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three their teaching quality does not 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 Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors says how much do they explain teaching quality. That thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, are a few places — very few — where teachers are being made. A good example of one a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — what goes on is great teaching. They take the kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go 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, saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was 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 were bored, and calling kids rapidly, things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, particularly in those middle school years — fifth through grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP 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, will limit the number of times the principal can come into 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 of just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying block the data. For example, New York passed a that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.
First all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s it well, and call them out, and find out those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s little clip of something I think I did poorly. me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees is the very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses not only be available just on the Internet, but you make it so that DVDs were always available, and anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave 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 education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact 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 because there are people who are threatened by these things.
But — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re excited, just at the very name of these things. And skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t 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 study things, get other people involved — and 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)