Recorded at | February 02, 2009 |
---|---|
Event | TED2009 |
Duration (min:sec) | 19:58 |
Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
Words per minute | 180.6 medium |
Readability (FK) | 66.57 very easy |
Speaker | Bill Gates |
Country | United States of America |
Occupation | entrepreneur, programmer, philanthropist |
Description | American businessman and philanthropist (born 1955) |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them. (And see the Q&A on the TED Blog.)
1 | 00:15 | I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, | ||
2 | 00:18 | sharing some of the problems. | ||
3 | 00:21 | And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that -- | ||
4 | 00:24 | being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, | ||
5 | 00:27 | and making it kind of an annual thing. | ||
6 | 00:30 | A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, | ||
7 | 00:33 | because I think there are some very important problems | ||
8 | 00:36 | that don't get worked on naturally. | ||
9 | 00:39 | That is, the market does not drive the scientists, | ||
10 | 00:44 | the communicators, the thinkers, the governments | ||
11 | 00:47 | to do the right things. | ||
12 | 00:50 | And only by paying attention to these things | ||
13 | 00:53 | and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in | ||
14 | 00:57 | can we make as much progress as we need to. | ||
15 | 00:59 | So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems | ||
16 | 01:02 | and talk about where they stand. | ||
17 | 01:05 | But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. | ||
18 | 01:09 | Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. | ||
19 | 01:13 | And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. | ||
20 | 01:16 | Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. | ||
21 | 01:21 | Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, | ||
22 | 01:24 | is to look at childhood deaths. | ||
23 | 01:27 | As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, | ||
24 | 01:33 | and 20 million of those died before the age of five. | ||
25 | 01:37 | Five years ago, 135 million children were born -- so, more -- | ||
26 | 01:41 | and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. | ||
27 | 01:47 | So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. | ||
28 | 01:52 | It's a phenomenal thing. | ||
29 | 01:54 | Each one of those lives matters a lot. | ||
30 | 01:57 | And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes | ||
31 | 02:02 | but also a few key breakthroughs: | ||
32 | 02:05 | vaccines that were used more widely. | ||
33 | 02:08 | For example, measles was four million of the deaths | ||
34 | 02:11 | back as recently as 1990 | ||
35 | 02:13 | and now is under 400,000. | ||
36 | 02:16 | So we really can make changes. | ||
37 | 02:18 | The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. | ||
38 | 02:22 | And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. | ||
39 | 02:26 | Why? Well there's only a few diseases | ||
40 | 02:30 | that account for the vast majority of those deaths: | ||
41 | 02:33 | diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. | ||
42 | 02:39 | So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, | ||
43 | 02:44 | which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos? | ||
44 | 02:51 | Well, what's the history of this disease? | ||
45 | 02:53 | It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. | ||
46 | 02:56 | In fact, if we look at the genetic code, | ||
47 | 02:59 | it's the only disease we can see | ||
48 | 03:02 | that people who lived in Africa | ||
49 | 03:04 | actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. | ||
50 | 03:08 | Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. | ||
51 | 03:14 | So it was absolutely gigantic. | ||
52 | 03:17 | And the disease was all over the world. | ||
53 | 03:20 | A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. | ||
54 | 03:23 | People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, | ||
55 | 03:26 | when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. | ||
56 | 03:32 | So it was everywhere. | ||
57 | 03:34 | And two tools helped bring the death rate down. | ||
58 | 03:38 | One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. | ||
59 | 03:41 | The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. | ||
60 | 03:46 | And so that's why the death rate did come down. | ||
61 | 03:50 | Now, ironically, what happened was | ||
62 | 03:53 | it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, | ||
63 | 03:56 | which is where the rich countries are. | ||
64 | 03:57 | So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. | ||
65 | 03:59 | 1945, it's still most places. | ||
66 | 04:03 | 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. | ||
67 | 04:06 | 1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. | ||
68 | 04:09 | And more recently you can see it's just around the equator. | ||
69 | 04:15 | And so this leads to the paradox that | ||
70 | 04:19 | because the disease is only in the poorer countries, | ||
71 | 04:21 | it doesn't get much investment. | ||
72 | 04:25 | For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs | ||
73 | 04:29 | than are put into malaria. | ||
74 | 04:32 | Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. | ||
75 | 04:35 | (Laughter) | ||
76 | 04:38 | And rich men are afflicted. | ||
77 | 04:41 | And so that's why that priority has been set. | ||
78 | 04:47 | But, malaria -- | ||
79 | 04:49 | even the million deaths a year caused by malaria | ||
80 | 04:51 | greatly understate its impact. | ||
81 | 04:53 | Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. | ||
82 | 04:56 | It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going | ||
83 | 05:01 | because it just holds things back so much. | ||
84 | 05:04 | Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. | ||
85 | 05:08 | I brought some here, just so you could experience this. | ||
86 | 05:13 | We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. | ||
87 | 05:17 | (Laughter) | ||
88 | 05:20 | There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. | ||
89 | 05:23 | (Laughter) (Applause) | ||
90 | 05:30 | Those mosquitos are not infected. | ||
91 | 05:35 | So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. | ||
92 | 05:39 | And bed nets are a great tool. | ||
93 | 05:42 | What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, | ||
94 | 05:45 | so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. | ||
95 | 05:50 | And when you use indoor spraying with DDT | ||
96 | 05:55 | and those nets | ||
97 | 05:56 | you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. | ||
98 | 05:59 | And that's happened now in a number of countries. | ||
99 | 06:02 | It's great to see. | ||
100 | 06:04 | But we have to be careful because malaria -- | ||
101 | 06:07 | the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. | ||
102 | 06:12 | So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. | ||
103 | 06:16 | And so you end up with two choices. | ||
104 | 06:19 | If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, | ||
105 | 06:23 | you do it vigorously, | ||
106 | 06:26 | you can actually get a local eradication. | ||
107 | 06:29 | And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. | ||
108 | 06:31 | Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, | ||
109 | 06:34 | for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, | ||
110 | 06:37 | but eventually those tools will become ineffective, | ||
111 | 06:41 | and the death rate will soar back up again. | ||
112 | 06:44 | And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention. | ||
113 | 06:49 | Now we're on the upswing. | ||
114 | 06:51 | Bed net funding is up. | ||
115 | 06:54 | There's new drug discovery going on. | ||
116 | 06:57 | Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial | ||
117 | 07:01 | that starts in a couple months. | ||
118 | 07:02 | And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. | ||
119 | 07:05 | So we're going to have these new tools. | ||
120 | 07:08 | But that alone doesn't give us the road map. | ||
121 | 07:11 | Because the road map to get rid of this disease | ||
122 | 07:14 | involves many things. | ||
123 | 07:16 | It involves communicators to keep the funding high, | ||
124 | 07:19 | to keep the visibility high, | ||
125 | 07:21 | to tell the success stories. | ||
126 | 07:23 | It involves social scientists, | ||
127 | 07:25 | so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, | ||
128 | 07:28 | but 90 percent. | ||
129 | 07:30 | We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, | ||
130 | 07:33 | to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. | ||
131 | 07:39 | Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. | ||
132 | 07:42 | We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. | ||
133 | 07:47 | And so as these elements come together, | ||
134 | 07:50 | I'm quite optimistic | ||
135 | 07:53 | that we will be able to eradicate malaria. | ||
136 | 07:57 | Now let me turn to a second question, | ||
137 | 08:00 | a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. | ||
138 | 08:04 | And this is: How do you make a teacher great? | ||
139 | 08:07 | It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, | ||
140 | 08:12 | and we'd understand very well. | ||
141 | 08:15 | And the answer is, really, that we don't. | ||
142 | 08:19 | Let's start with why this is important. | ||
143 | 08:22 | Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. | ||
144 | 08:26 | We all had a wonderful education. | ||
145 | 08:29 | That's part of the reason we're here today, | ||
146 | 08:32 | part of the reason we're successful. | ||
147 | 08:34 | I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. | ||
148 | 08:37 | I had great teachers. | ||
149 | 08:40 | In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. | ||
150 | 08:45 | There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. | ||
151 | 08:50 | So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. | ||
152 | 08:53 | And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, | ||
153 | 08:57 | if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. | ||
154 | 09:00 | And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology | ||
155 | 09:05 | and keep the U.S. at the forefront. | ||
156 | 09:09 | Now, the strength for those top 20 percent | ||
157 | 09:12 | is starting to fade on a relative basis, | ||
158 | 09:15 | but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. | ||
159 | 09:21 | Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. | ||
160 | 09:26 | And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now | ||
161 | 09:30 | to people with a better education. | ||
162 | 09:33 | And we have to change this. | ||
163 | 09:36 | We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. | ||
164 | 09:39 | We have to change it so that the country is strong | ||
165 | 09:42 | and stays at the forefront | ||
166 | 09:44 | of things that are driven by advanced education, | ||
167 | 09:47 | like science and mathematics. | ||
168 | 09:49 | When I first learned the statistics, | ||
169 | 09:52 | I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. | ||
170 | 09:55 | Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. | ||
171 | 09:58 | And that had been covered up for a long time | ||
172 | 10:01 | because they always took the dropout rate as the number | ||
173 | 10:04 | who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. | ||
174 | 10:09 | Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. | ||
175 | 10:11 | But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. | ||
176 | 10:14 | They had to raise the stated dropout rate | ||
177 | 10:17 | as soon as that tracking was done | ||
178 | 10:19 | to over 30 percent. | ||
179 | 10:21 | For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. | ||
180 | 10:25 | And even if you graduate from high school, | ||
181 | 10:28 | if you're low-income, | ||
182 | 10:31 | you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. | ||
183 | 10:35 | If you're low-income in the United States, | ||
184 | 10:40 | you have a higher chance of going to jail | ||
185 | 10:44 | than you do of getting a four-year degree. | ||
186 | 10:46 | And that doesn't seem entirely fair. | ||
187 | 10:49 | So, how do you make education better? | ||
188 | 10:52 | Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. | ||
189 | 10:56 | There's many people working on it. | ||
190 | 10:59 | We've worked on small schools, | ||
191 | 11:02 | we've funded scholarships, | ||
192 | 11:04 | we've done things in libraries. | ||
193 | 11:06 | A lot of these things had a good effect. | ||
194 | 11:08 | But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers | ||
195 | 11:11 | was the very key thing. | ||
196 | 11:14 | And we hooked up with some people studying | ||
197 | 11:17 | how much variation is there between teachers, | ||
198 | 11:20 | between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- | ||
199 | 11:23 | and the bottom quartile. | ||
200 | 11:25 | How much variation is there within a school or between schools? | ||
201 | 11:28 | And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. | ||
202 | 11:33 | A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- | ||
203 | 11:38 | based on test scores -- | ||
204 | 11:41 | by over 10 percent in a single year. | ||
205 | 11:43 | What does that mean? | ||
206 | 11:44 | That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, | ||
207 | 11:47 | had top quartile teachers, | ||
208 | 11:50 | the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. | ||
209 | 11:54 | Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away. | ||
210 | 12:00 | So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. | ||
211 | 12:05 | And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. | ||
212 | 12:09 | We should retain those people. | ||
213 | 12:12 | We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." | ||
214 | 12:15 | But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today. | ||
215 | 12:20 | What are the characteristics of this top quartile? | ||
216 | 12:23 | What do they look like? | ||
217 | 12:25 | You might think these must be very senior teachers. | ||
218 | 12:28 | And the answer is no. | ||
219 | 12:30 | Once somebody has taught for three years | ||
220 | 12:33 | their teaching quality does not change thereafter. | ||
221 | 12:38 | The variation is very, very small. | ||
222 | 12:41 | You might think these are people with master's degrees. | ||
223 | 12:46 | They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. | ||
224 | 12:49 | This chart takes four different factors | ||
225 | 12:52 | and says how much do they explain teaching quality. | ||
226 | 12:55 | That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, | ||
227 | 12:58 | is a master's degree. | ||
228 | 13:02 | Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. | ||
229 | 13:06 | One is seniority. | ||
230 | 13:08 | Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. | ||
231 | 13:11 | The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. | ||
232 | 13:14 | But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. | ||
233 | 13:17 | Teach for America: slight effect. | ||
234 | 13:20 | For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. | ||
235 | 13:24 | But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. | ||
236 | 13:29 | There are some people who are very good at this. | ||
237 | 13:32 | And we've done almost nothing | ||
238 | 13:35 | to study what that is | ||
239 | 13:38 | and to draw it in and to replicate it, | ||
240 | 13:41 | to raise the average capability -- | ||
241 | 13:44 | or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system. | ||
242 | 13:47 | You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" | ||
243 | 13:50 | The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. | ||
244 | 13:53 | And it's a system with very high turnover. | ||
245 | 13:57 | Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. | ||
246 | 14:03 | A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. | ||
247 | 14:08 | KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. | ||
248 | 14:11 | It's an unbelievable thing. | ||
249 | 14:14 | They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools, some high schools -- | ||
250 | 14:17 | and what goes on is great teaching. | ||
251 | 14:21 | They take the poorest kids, | ||
252 | 14:24 | and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. | ||
253 | 14:28 | And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools | ||
254 | 14:31 | is very different than in the normal public schools. | ||
255 | 14:34 | They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. | ||
256 | 14:38 | They're taking data, the test scores, | ||
257 | 14:41 | and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." | ||
258 | 14:44 | They're deeply engaged in making teaching better. | ||
259 | 14:48 | When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, | ||
260 | 14:51 | at first it's very bizarre. | ||
261 | 14:54 | I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" | ||
262 | 14:57 | The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. | ||
263 | 15:00 | I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. | ||
264 | 15:03 | What's going on?" | ||
265 | 15:05 | And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, | ||
266 | 15:08 | which kids were bored, | ||
267 | 15:10 | and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. | ||
268 | 15:13 | It was a very dynamic environment, | ||
269 | 15:15 | because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- | ||
270 | 15:18 | keeping people engaged and setting the tone | ||
271 | 15:21 | that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, | ||
272 | 15:24 | nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. | ||
273 | 15:30 | Everybody needs to be involved. | ||
274 | 15:32 | And so KIPP is doing it. | ||
275 | 15:35 | How does that compare to a normal school? | ||
276 | 15:38 | Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. | ||
277 | 15:42 | The data isn't gathered. | ||
278 | 15:45 | In the teacher's contract, | ||
279 | 15:47 | it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- | ||
280 | 15:51 | sometimes to once per year. | ||
281 | 15:53 | And they need advanced notice to do that. | ||
282 | 15:56 | So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, | ||
283 | 15:59 | some of them just making crap | ||
284 | 16:02 | and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, | ||
285 | 16:06 | but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, | ||
286 | 16:08 | and try and do a good job in that one brief moment." | ||
287 | 16:12 | Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. | ||
288 | 16:17 | They don't have the test scores, | ||
289 | 16:19 | and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. | ||
290 | 16:22 | For example, New York passed a law | ||
291 | 16:25 | that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used | ||
292 | 16:30 | in the tenure decision for the teachers. | ||
293 | 16:34 | And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. | ||
294 | 16:37 | But I'm optimistic about this, | ||
295 | 16:39 | I think there are some clear things we can do. | ||
296 | 16:43 | First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, | ||
297 | 16:47 | and that's given us the picture of where we are. | ||
298 | 16:50 | And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, | ||
299 | 16:54 | and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. | ||
300 | 16:57 | Of course, digital video is cheap now. | ||
301 | 17:00 | Putting a few cameras in the classroom | ||
302 | 17:02 | and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis | ||
303 | 17:08 | is very practical in all public schools. | ||
304 | 17:10 | And so every few weeks teachers could sit down | ||
305 | 17:13 | and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. | ||
306 | 17:16 | Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. | ||
307 | 17:19 | Advise me -- when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" | ||
308 | 17:22 | And they could all sit and work together on those problems. | ||
309 | 17:26 | You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, | ||
310 | 17:30 | have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff. | ||
311 | 17:34 | You can take those great courses and make them available | ||
312 | 17:36 | so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. | ||
313 | 17:41 | If you have a kid who's behind, | ||
314 | 17:43 | you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. | ||
315 | 17:47 | And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, | ||
316 | 17:51 | but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, | ||
317 | 17:55 | and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. | ||
318 | 18:02 | And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, | ||
319 | 18:07 | we can do it much better. | ||
320 | 18:09 | Now there's a book actually, about KIPP -- | ||
321 | 18:11 | the place that this is going on -- | ||
322 | 18:13 | that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote -- called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." | ||
323 | 18:18 | And I thought it was so fantastic. | ||
324 | 18:20 | It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. | ||
325 | 18:24 | I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. | ||
326 | 18:27 | (Applause) | ||
327 | 18:32 | Now, we put a lot of money into education, | ||
328 | 18:35 | and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right | ||
329 | 18:41 | for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. | ||
330 | 18:46 | In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it's interesting -- | ||
331 | 18:48 | the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, | ||
332 | 18:51 | and it was taken out in the Senate | ||
333 | 18:53 | because there are people who are threatened by these things. | ||
334 | 18:56 | But I -- I'm optimistic. | ||
335 | 18:58 | I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, | ||
336 | 19:02 | and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. | ||
337 | 19:09 | I only had time to frame those two problems. | ||
338 | 19:12 | There's a lot more problems like that -- | ||
339 | 19:14 | AIDS, pneumonia -- I can just see you're getting excited, | ||
340 | 19:18 | just at the very name of these things. | ||
341 | 19:21 | And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. | ||
342 | 19:26 | You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. | ||
343 | 19:29 | Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. | ||
344 | 19:34 | The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things. | ||
345 | 19:38 | So it's going to take brilliant people like you | ||
346 | 19:41 | to study these things, get other people involved -- | ||
347 | 19:44 | and you're helping to come up with solutions. | ||
348 | 19:47 | And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it. | ||
349 | 19:50 | Thank you. | ||
350 | 19:52 | (Applause) |