I wrote a letter week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an thing. A goal I had there was to draw people in to work on those problems, because I think are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
So morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And of the reason I feel that way is looking the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before age of five. So that’s a factor of two of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, 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. 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 us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived 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. the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. it was 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 the temperate zones, which is the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten of the northern areas. And more recently you can 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 baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. so that’s why that priority has been set.
But, — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those 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 means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now a number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the has eventually become ineffective. And so you end 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 we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back 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. 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 lives 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 to get rid of this disease involves things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. involves social scientists, so we know how to get just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will able 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? It like the kind of question that people would spend lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all 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. had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set places. So the top 20 percent of students have a good education. And those top 20 percent have been best in the world, if you measure them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, even more concerning is 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 with a better education. And we have to change this. We to change it so 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 first learned the statistics, I was stunned at how bad 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 number who in senior year and compared it to the number finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we be blowing everyone in the world away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. variation is very, very small. You might think these are people master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way 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 second is giving money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s past performance. There are some people who are very at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to it in 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 stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better leave the system. And it’s a system with very turnover.
Now, there are a few places — very few — great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re 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 and sit in one these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s 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. It a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so 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, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement 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 going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very in all public schools. And so every few weeks could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work on those problems. You can take the very best and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses make them available so that a kid could go out and watch physics course, learn from that. If you have a who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s 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 of what a good teacher does. I’m going to everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, I really think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the version actually had money in 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 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 problems like that — AIDS, — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come of it.
Thank you. (Applause)