I a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do — being 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 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 brilliant people who care draw other people in can we make as much progress we need 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 that I am an 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 look at childhood deaths. recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and than 10 million of them died before the age five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each of those lives matters a lot.
And the key reason we were able to it not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that used more widely. For example, measles was four million the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now 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 doable in under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us 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 disease 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 million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, 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 places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this leads the paradox that because 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. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) mosquitos are 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 and those nets you cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so 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 we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. the world has gone through this where it paid and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial starts in a couple 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 to rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these come 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 well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, teaching system 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. those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more is the education that the balance of people are getting. only has that been weak. it’s getting weaker. And if you look at economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so people have equal opportunity. We have to change it that the country is strong and stays at the 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 kids never finish high school. And had been covered up for a long time because they always the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where kids were before that. But most of the dropouts taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than 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. that doesn’t seem entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last years, has invested in this. There’s many people working it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. the more we looked at it, the more we realized that great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation there within a school or between schools? And the answer is these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase performance of their class — based on test scores — over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if entire 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 need are those top quartile teachers. so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay up and you vest into your pension. The second giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw 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, average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a few — very few — where great teachers are being made. good example of one is a set of charter called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare to 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 limit the number of times the principal can come into classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just crap and 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 good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New passed a law that said that the teacher improvement could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m about this, I think there are some clear things we 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 understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find 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 very practical in public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I I did well. Here’s a little clip of something think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt that?” And they could all sit and work together those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind 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 the physics course, from 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 were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, KIPP — the place that 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 everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot money into education, and I really think that education is most important thing to get right for the country to have as a future as it should have. In fact we in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in 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. think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I had time 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 name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get people involved — and you’re helping to come up solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great that will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)