I a letter last week talking about the work of foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet recommended I do that — being honest about what 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 those problems, because I think there are some very important problems don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the to do the right things. And only by paying attention these things and having brilliant people who care and other people in can we make as much progress we need to.
So this morning I’m going to two of these problems and talk about where they stand. before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children born — so, more — and less than 10 million them died before the age of five. So that’s factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s phenomenal thing. Each one 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 were used more widely. example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough 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 vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.
So that brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread mosquitos?
Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.
Now, ironically, what happened was it was from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich 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. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And this leads to the paradox that because the disease is in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. 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 year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million at any one time are suffering from it. It that you can’t get the economies in these areas because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos 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 mother child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that late at night can’t get at them. And when you indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. you go into a country with the right tools the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually 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 time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar 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. foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase trial that starts in a couple months. And that save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. we’re going to have these new tools.
But that alone doesn’t us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to very generous in providing aid for these things. And so these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.
Now me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems 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 why this important. Well, all of 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. I had great teachers.
In fact, the United 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 education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep U.S. at the forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it’s weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have change this. We have to change it so that people have opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 of kids never finish high school. And that had been up for a long time because they always took the dropout as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going 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 things had a effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there a 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 scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the difference between 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 teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should those people. We should find out what they’re doing and that skill to other people.” But I can tell you absolutely is not happening today.
What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s Education. This chart takes four different factors and says much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the way the pay system is there’s two 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 their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your 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 — or to encourage the people with it to in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are a places — very few — where great teachers are made. A good example of one is a set charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.
When you actually go and in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very 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 sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which 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 those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP doing it.
How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in normal school, teachers aren’t told how good they are. data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you only come down here once a year, but you to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and and do a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to the 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 in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, 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 picture of we are. And that allows us to understand who’s 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 ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. so every few weeks teachers 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 together on those problems. You can the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is very best at teaching this stuff.
You can take great courses and make them available so that a kid go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you know you could assign them that video to watch and review concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as personnel system, we can do it much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone a free copy of this book. (Applause)
Now, we put a of money into education, and 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 we have the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are by these things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources 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 with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things will come out of it.
Thank you. (Applause)