Mosquitos malaria and education Bill Gates
I wrote a letter last week talking about
the work of the foundation sharing some
of the problems and Warren Buffett had
recommended I do that being honest about
what was going well what wasn’t and
making it kind of an annual thing a goal
I had There was to draw more people in
to work on those problems because I
think there are some very important
problems that don’t get worked on
naturally that is the market does not
drive the scientists the communicators
the thinkers the government’s to do the
right things and only by paying
attention to these things and having
brilliant people who care and draw their
people in can we make as much progress
as we need to so this morning I’m going
to share two of these problems and talk
about where they stand but before I dive
into those I want to admit that I am an
optimist any top problem I think it it
can be solved and part of the reason I
feel that way is looking at the past
over the last century average lifespan
has more than doubled another statistic
perhaps my favorite is to look at
childhood deaths as recently as nineteen
sixty 110 million children were born and
20 million of those died before the age
of five five years ago a hundred and
thirty five million children were born
so more and less than 10 million of them
died before the age of five so that’s a
factor of two reduction in the child to
death rate it’s a phenomenal things I
mean each one of those lives matters a
lot and the key reason we were able to
do it was not only rising incomes but
also a few key breakthroughs vaccines
that were used more widely
for example measles was 4 million of the
deaths back as recently as 1990 and now
is under 400,000 so we really can make
changes the next breakthrough is to cut
that 10 mm
in half again and I think that’s doable
in well under 20 years why well there’s
only a few diseases that account for the
vast majority of those deaths diarrhea
pneumonia and malaria and so that brings
us to the the first problem that all all
raised this morning which is how do we
stop a disease a deadly disease that’s
spread by mosquitoes what’s the history
of this 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 the people who
lived in Africa actually evolved several
things to avoid malarial deaths that’s
actually peaked at a bit over five
million in the 1930s so it was
absolutely gigantic and the disease was
all over the world terrible disease it
was in the United States it was in
Europe people didn’t know what caused it
until the early 1900s when a British
military man figured out that it was
mosquitoes so it was everywhere
and two tools helped bring the death
breakdown one was killing the mosquitoes
with DDT and the other was treating the
patients with quinine or quinine
derivatives and so that’s why the death
rate did come down now ironically what
happened was it was eliminated from all
the temperate zones which is where all
the rich countries are so we can see
1900s everywhere 1945 still most places
1970 the US and most of Europe have
gotten rid of it 1990 you’ve gotten more
Stu northern areas and then more
recently you can see it’s just around
the equator and so this leads to the
paradox that because the disease is only
in the poor countries it doesn’t get
much investment for example there’s more
money put into baldness drugs than are
put into malaria now baldness is it’s
terrible
and rich men are afflicted and so that’s
why that priority has been set but
malaria they even the million deaths a
year caused by malaria greatly
understate its impact over 200 million
people at any one time are suffering
from it means that you can’t get the
economies in these areas going because
there’s just it holds things back so
much now malaria of course transmitted
by mosquitoes I brought some here so you
could experience this we’ll let let
those roam around the auditorium a
little bit there
there’s no reason only poor people
should have have the experience
not those mosquitoes are not not
infected but so we’ve come up with a few
new things we’ve got bed nets and bed
nets are a great tool what it means is
the mother and child stay under the bed
net at night and so the mosquitoes that
bite late at night I can’t get at them
and when you use indoor spraying with
DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by
over 50% and that’s happened now in a
number of countries it’s great to see
but we have to be careful because
malaria the parasite evolves and the
mosquito evolves so every tool that
we’ve ever had in the past has
eventually become ineffective and so you
end up with two choices if you go into a
country with the right tools in the
right way and you do it vigorously you
can actually get a local eradication and
that’s where we saw the malaria map
shrinking or if you go in kind of
half-heartedly for a period of time
you’ll reduce the disease burden but
eventually those tools will become
ineffective and the death rate will soar
back up again
and the world has gone through this
where it paid attention and then didn’t
pay attention now we’re on the upswing
bed net funding is up there’s new drug
discovery going on our foundation is
back to vaccine that’s going into phase
three trial that starts in a couple
months and that should save over
two-thirds of lives if it’s effective
and so we’re going to have these new
tools but that alone doesn’t give us the
roadmap because the roadmap to get rid
of this disease involves many things it
involves communicators to keep the
funding high to keep the visibility high
to tell the success stories it involves
social scientists so we know how to get
not just 70% of people to use the bed
nets but 90% we need mathematicians to
come in and simulate this to monte-carlo
things to understand how these tools
combine and work together
of course we need drug companies to give
us their expertise we need rich world
governments to be very generous in in
providing aid for these things and so as
these elements come together I’m quite
optimistic that we will be able to
eradicate malaria well now let me turn
to a second question a fairly different
question but I’d say equally important
and this is how do you make a teacher
great now seems like the kind of
question that people would spend a lot
of time on and that we’d understand very
well
and the answer is really that we don’t
let’s start with why this is important
well all of us here all bat had some
great teachers we all had a wonderful
education that’s part of the reason
we’re here today part of the reason
we’re successful I can say that even
though I’m a college dropout I had great
teachers and in fact in the United
States the teaching system has worked
fairly well there are fairly effective
teachers in a narrow set of places so
the top 20 percent of students have
gotten a good education and those top 20
percent have been the best in the world
if you measure them against the other
top twenty percent and they’ve gone on
to create the revolutions in software
and biotechnology and keep the u.s. at
the forefront now the strength for those
top 20 percent is starting to fade on a
relative basis but even more concerning
is the education that the balance of
people are getting not only is that been
weak it’s getting weaker and if you look
at the economy it really is only
providing opportunities now to people
with a better education and so we have
to change this we have to change it so
that people have equal opportunity we
have to change it so that the country is
strong and stays in the forefront of
things that are driven by advanced
education like Science and Mathematics
when I first learned the statistics I
was pretty
how bad things are over 30% of kids
never finish high school and that had
been covered up for a long time because
they always took the dropout rate is the
number who started in senior year and
and then compared it to the number of
the finished senior year because they
were tracking where the kids were before
that but most of the dropouts had taken
place before that so they had to raise
the state of dropout rate as soon as
that tracking was done to over 30
percent for minority kids it’s over 50
percent and even if you graduate from
high school if you’re low income you
have less than a 25% chance of ever
completing a college degree if you’re
low income in the United States you have
a higher chance of going to jail than
you do of getting a four-year degree and
that you know doesn’t seem entirely fair
so how do you make education better our
foundation for the last nine years is
invested in this there’s many people
working on it we’ve worked on small
schools we funded scholarships we’ve
done things in libraries a lot of these
things had a good effect but the more we
looked at it the more we realized that
having great teachers was the very key
thing and so we hooked up with some
people studying how much variation is
there between teachers between say the
top quartile the very best and the
bottom quartile how much variation is
there within a school or between schools
and the answer is that these variations
are absolutely unbelievable a top
quartile teacher will increase the
performance of their class based on test
scores by over 10% in a single year what
does that mean well that means that the
entire us for two years had top quartile
teachers the entire difference between
US and Asia
would go away and within four years we
would be blowing everyone in the world
away so it’s simple all you need is
those top quartile teachers
and so you’d say well wow that’s good we
should reward those people we should
retain those people we should find out
what they’re doing and transfer that
skill to other people but I can tell you
that absolutely is not happening today
what are the characteristics of this top
quartile what do they they look like you
might think well these must be very
senior teachers and the answer is no
once somebody is taught for three years
their teaching quality does not change
thereafter the variation is very very
small you might think well these are
people with master’s degrees they’ve
gone back and they’ve gotten their
masters education
this chart takes four different factors
and says how much do they explain
teaching quality that bottom thing which
says there’s no effect at all is a
master’s degree now the way the P system
works is there’s two things are rewarded
one is seniority because your pay goes
up and you vest in your pension and the
second is giving extra money to people
who get their master’s degree but in no
ways associated with being a better
teacher Teach for America slight effect
for math teachers majoring in math is a
measurable effect but overwhelmingly
it’s your past performance there are
some people who are very good at this
and we’ve done almost nothing to study
what that is and to draw it in to to
replicate it to raise the average
capability or to encourage the people
with it to stay in the system you might
say we’ll do the good teachers stay in
the bad teachers leave the answer is on
average the slightly better teachers
leave the system and it’s a system with
very high turnover now there are a few
places very few where great teachers are
being made a good example of one is a
set of charter schools called Kip Kip
means knowledge is power
it’s an unbelievable thing they have 66
schools mostly middle schools seven high
schools
and what goes on is great teaching they
take the poorest kids and over 96% of
their high school graduates go to
four-year colleges and the whole spirit
and attitude in those schools is very
different than in the normal public
school they’re team-teaching they’re
constantly improving their teachers
they’re taking data the test scores and
saying to a teacher hey you caused this
amount of increase and so they’re deeply
engaged in making teaching better when
you actually go in and sit in one of
these classrooms at first it’s very
bizarre i sat down and I thought what is
going on the teacher was running around
and the entered light energy levels high
I thought well I’m in the prep the the
sports rally or something what’s going
on and the teacher was constantly
scanning to see which kids weren’t
paying attention which kids were bored
and calling on kids rapidly putting
things up on the board it was a very
dynamic environment because particularly
in those middle school years two through
eighth grade keeping people engaged and
setting the tone that everybody in the
classroom needs to pay attention nobody
gets make fun of it or have the position
of you know the kid who who doesn’t want
to be there everybody needs to be
involved and so Kipp is doing it how
does that compare to a normal school
within a normal school teachers aren’t
told how good they are the data isn’t
gathered in the teachers contract it
will limit the number of times the
principal can come into the classroom
sometimes two once per year and they
need advance notice to do that so
imagine running a factory we’ve got
these workers some of them just making
crap and the management is told hey you
can only come down here once a year but
you need to let us know because we might
actually do fool you and try and do a
good job in that one brief moment even a
teacher wants to improve doesn’t have
the tools to do it they don’t have the
test scores and there’s a whole thing of
trying to block the data for example New
York passed a law that said that the
teacher improvement data could not be
made available and used in the tenure to
say
for the teachers and so that’s sort of
working in the opposite directions but
I’m optimistic about this I think
there’s some clear things we can do
first of all there’s a lot more testing
going on and that’s given us the picture
of where we are and that allows us to
understand who’s doing it well and call
them out and find out what those
techniques are of course digital video
is cheap now putting a few cameras in
the classroom and saying that things are
are being recorded on an ongoing basis
it is very practical in all public
schools and so every few weeks teachers
could sit down and say okay here’s a
little clip of something I thought I did
well here’s a little clip of something I
think I did poorly advise me when this
kid acted up how should I have dealt
with that and they can all sit and work
together on those problems you can take
the very best teachers and kind of
annotate it have it so everyone sees who
is the very best teaching the stuff you
can take those great courses and make
them available so that a kid could go
out and watch the physics course learn
from that if you have a kid who’s behind
you would know you could assign them
that video to watch and review the
concept and in fact these three courses
could not only be available just on the
internet but you could make it so that
DVDs were always available and so
anybody who has access to a DVD player
can have the very best teachers and so
by thinking of this is a a personnel
system we can do it much better there’s
a book actually about hip the place that
this is going on the Jay Matthews a news
reporter wrote called
work hard be nice and I thought it was
so fantastic give you a sense of what a
good teacher does I’m going to send
everyone here a free copy of this book
now we put a lot of money into education
and I really think that education is the
most important thing to get right for
the country to have as strong a futurist
should have fact we have in the stimulus
bill it’s interesting the House version
actually had money in it for these data
systems and was taken out in the Senate
because they’re there people are
threatened by these things but I am
optimistic I think people are beginning
to recognize how important this is and
it really can make a difference for
millions of lives if we get it right
well I only had time to pray those two
problems there’s a lot more problems
like that aids pneumonia and just see
you’re getting excited just at the very
name of these things and the skill sets
required to tackle these things are very
broad you know the system doesn’t
naturally make it happen
governments don’t naturally pick these
things in the right way the private
sector doesn’t naturally put its
resources into these things so it’s
going to take brilliant people like you
to study these things get other people
involved and you’re helping to come up
with solutions and with that I think
there’s some great things will come out
of it thank you
you