I wrote a letter last week about the work of the foundation, sharing some of problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can make as much progress as we need to.
So this I’m going to share two of these problems and talk where they stand. But before I dive into those want to admit that I am an optimist. Any problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look 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 children born — so, more — and less than 10 million of died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the 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 not only 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 is under 400,000. So we can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million half again. And I think that’s doable in well 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll this morning, which is how do we stop a disease that’s spread by mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease 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 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 killing mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so this to the paradox that because the disease is only in poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that has been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are from it. It means that you can’t get the in these areas going because it just holds things so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve come with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And 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 we have to be because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right and the right way, you do it vigorously, you actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three that starts in a couple months. And that should over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. 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 to the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world to be very generous in providing aid for these things. so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now let me to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that 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, 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 we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There 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 them against the top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.
Now, strength for 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 people with a education. And we have to change this. We have to it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the is strong and stays 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 kids never high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because always took the dropout rate as the number who in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place 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 from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the 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, how do make education better?
Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done in libraries. A lot of these things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked with some people studying how much variation is there teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent a single year. What does that mean? That means if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the away.
So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The is very, 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 takes four different factors and says how much do they explain quality. That 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. is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your performance. There are 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, to raise the capability — or to encourage the people with it stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the teachers 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 places — very — where great teachers are being made. A good of one is a set of charter schools called 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 school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole and attitude in those schools is very different than the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to 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. I sat down and I thought, “What going 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 constantly scanning 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, because particularly in those school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.
How does that to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. The isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory 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 to us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the improvement data could not be made available and used 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 more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the and saying that things are being recorded on an basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, should I have dealt with that?” And they could sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best teaching this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you assign them that video to watch and review the concept. in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking this as a personnel system, we can do it better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I think that education is the most important thing to right for the country to have as strong a as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money it for these data systems, and it was taken in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are to recognize how important this is, and it really 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 like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the name of these things. And the skill sets required tackle these things are very broad. You know, the doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.
So it’s going to take brilliant like you to study these things, get other people — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And that, I think there’s some great things that will come out it.
Thank you. (Applause)