I wrote a last week talking about the work of the foundation, 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 people in to work those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. is, the 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 who care and draw other people in can we make as much as we need to.
So this morning I’m going share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died the age of five. So that’s a factor of reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. one of those lives matters a lot.
And the reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in again. And 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 brings us to the first that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a disease 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 at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 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 eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.
And so leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority been set.
But, malaria — even the million deaths a caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.
So we’ve up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the and child stay under the bed net at night, so mosquitos that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in number of countries. It’s great to see.
But we have be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. so you end up with two choices. If you go into country with the right tools and the right way, do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, the death rate will soar back up again. And the has gone through this where it paid attention and didn’t pay attention.
Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going phase three 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 give the road map. Because the road map to get of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell 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 Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very in providing aid for these things. And so as these come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able eradicate malaria.
Now let me turn 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 people would a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.
In fact, in the United States, the teaching system worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent been the best in the world, if you measure them against other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at forefront.
Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that balance of people are getting. Not only 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. have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. have to change it so that the country is strong and stays the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, science and mathematics.
When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number 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 most of the dropouts had taken place that. They had to 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, you have less than a 25 percent chance ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t entirely fair.
So, how do you make education better?
Now, foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s 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 good effect. But the more looked at it, the more we realized that having teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., 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. you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we reward those people. We should retain those people. We should out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.
What are characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s effect at all, is a master’s degree.
Now, the the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to the average capability — or to encourage the people it to stay in the system.
You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.
Now, there are few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those 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, and saying to teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply in making teaching better.
When you actually go and sit in 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 level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because 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 the position of the kid doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. so KIPP is doing it.
How does that compare a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren’t how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, of 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 try and a good job in that one brief moment.”
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a thing of trying to block the data. For example, York passed a law that said that the teacher data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I 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 where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And 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 of something I think did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have with that?” And they could all sit and work together on problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at this stuff.
You can take those great courses and make them available so a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know 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 DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD can have the very best teachers. And so by of this as a personnel system, we can do much better.
Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of book. (Applause)
Now, we put a lot of money education, and I really think that education is the important thing to get right for the country to have strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in for these data systems, and it was taken out in Senate because there are people who are threatened by things.
But I — I’m optimistic. I think people beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make 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 that — AIDS, pneumonia — I just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are broad. You 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 into these things.
So it’s to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other 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)