Bennett College Founders Day

October 8, 2006
Remarks by William H. Gates Sr., co-chair

Thank you, sisters and brothers. Sisters and brothers—Johnnetta taught me how to say that. 

I am very happy to be here today. It is a pleasure to address young women under Johnnetta’s tutelage, though I don’t know what I can add to the considerable wisdom she has already imparted to you. 

When she became chair of the United Way board that I served on, I learned quickly that she provides a kind of leadership we need more of in this country. She is not just somebody who knows how to win an election or give the impression of being in charge. She seeks out the toughest problems and then solves them, and that is what a leader should do.

I am especially honored to be asked to help you celebrate Founders’ Day here at Bennett College. When I reflect on the challenges your founders faced, I am in awe. They certainly understood the meaning of leadership. I have tried to imagine their moment in history: Millions of African Americans were starting brand new lives as free people, and with limited resources they had to make choices about what their community would need most over the decades to come. 

They wanted to build an institution that would last, and that would make the biggest difference for men and women who had been born into slavery. They decided that, ultimately, learning and literacy were the keys to freedom.

Today, we have much to learn from your founders and their vision of what constituted a good life. We have lost that focus on long-term thinking. Listen to our politicians. Are they grappling with our impending energy crisis? Are they concentrating on the fact that our federal deficit threatens to force the country into bankruptcy? Watch the cable news. Instead of honest debate, we get empty promises. Instead of tomorrow’s solutions, we hear about yesterday’s scandals. 

As you go through your years at Bennett and think about your futures, I hope you learn to look beyond tomorrow, next week, and next year. I hope you ask yourself what you can do over the 50 years of your working lives to make the problems that plague our world a little bit better. This is what I’d like to talk about today.

I am a proud father because my children have asked themselves that question. My son, the other Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, started their foundation because they believe what you believe: that every life has equal value—that every person, no matter where he or she lives, deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy, productive life. They also know they’ve been extremely fortunate, and they feel a responsibility to share that good fortune.

Because they are serious business-like people, they insist that their investments get the best return possible. In philanthropy, getting the best return means doing the most good for the most people.

That is why the foundation focuses tightly on a few neglected problems. That way, we can learn what works and what doesn’t, and our interventions will have more impact over the long term.

Around the world, we see the greatest need in health. So we focus on making sure sick people in poor countries have access to the same lifesaving vaccines and treatments that people in rich countries do. And we concentrate on driving research and development on diseases that kill millions in the developing world but don’t get much attention here. 

For instance, every year, malaria alone kills more than a million people, virtually all of them in poor countries. That’s like wiping out Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro—every year. But malaria can be prevented with a simple net, which keeps away the mosquitoes that carry the disease. 

The fact that we let anyone—let alone 2,000 children every day—die for want of a $3 mosquito net is a disgraceful reflection of our problem with short-sightedness.

We’re proud to be part of the fight against that kind of senseless death. But we also know that it doesn’t do much good to save a child from malaria if she is doomed to die of malnutrition just a few years later.

So if we want to do the most good for the most people, and if we’re thinking long-term, we have to tackle not just health problems, but hunger and poverty, too.

The numbers are staggering. One billion people live on less than $1 per day. One in eight people suffers from chronic hunger, which means their daily diets don’t provide enough calories to sustain a healthy life. 

As those of you in the Global Studies program may know, sub-Saharan Africa is the only place in the world where people have less food year after year. Today, farmers in the region are forced to contend with problems their parents never dreamed of.

As the population grows, they have no choice but to cultivate their land more intensively, which takes nutrients out of the soil, making their crops more vulnerable to disease and infestation. Add increasingly volatile weather to the equation, and tens of millions of Africans are now living on the edge of starvation.

Sixteen of the 18 most under-nourished countries in the world are in Africa.

These are deeply entrenched problems, with no quick fixes. And yet we have learned from organizations that have been working in these fields for years that there are solutions, if we are willing to face facts and respond boldly. 

In the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation went to Mexico to help farmers there grow more food. It took a long time—50 years—but a “Green Revolution” eventually spread over most of Latin America and Asia, and farmers there doubled their crop yields. But the Green Revolution passed Africa by. Our goal is to help spur one now. 

The idea is to take a comprehensive approach to improving agriculture, starting with the seeds farmers plant and ending with the markets where they sell surplus crops. 

In the end, we expect that small farmers will have more to eat—and more food left over, which they can sell. 

This is the kind of long-term, lasting change that could help millions of people escape hunger and desperate poverty.

In the United States, we believe that the best way to help people improve their lives is through education. Yet more than a century after Bennett’s founding, we still don’t have a public school system that builds on the great promise of a free education for all people. This is one of the country’s greatest failures of long-term thinking.

I know many of you in the audience worked very hard to get where you are today. But you are the lucky ones. A third of the young people who started ninth grade this year won’t graduate from high school. Another third will graduate but won’t be ready for what comes next—college or a good job. And the odds are even worse for African Americans and Hispanics. Only about half will graduate from high school. Public schools should be an engine of social justice, but too often they help perpetuate injustice.

These statistics are shocking, but they’re not exactly news. We haven’t been ignoring the education crisis in this country. In fact, it’s been near the top of the public agenda for almost 20 years. But change on the scale that’s needed in our schools doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in a decade or two. Again, we need to think long-term.

The civil rights movement offers a good lesson. For decades before Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, activists and lawyers had been laying the groundwork for that landmark ruling. And after Brown, it took 10 years of marches and protests by millions of ordinary citizens—and the sit-ins that started with college students right here in Greensboro—before Congress passed the most basic civil rights legislation. And in the 40 years since then, we’ve been trying to make sure that we as a nation live up to the promise of justice for all our citizens.

In many ways, the education movement we’re building is the continuation of that movement. In fact, Bob Moses, the great civil rights activist in Mississippi who later started an organization called the Algebra Project, has said that “transforming math education in our schools is as urgent in today’s world as was winning the right to vote in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s.”

Bob Moses knows something about what your founders were thinking 133 years ago, when they decided that what newly free African Americans needed most was a school.

So where are we in our education movement? Back in the mid-1980s, when most of you were born, the Department of Education said we were a nation in crisis, with almost no strategy for solving that crisis.

As you were growing up, the states started launching initiatives to improve their schools. They set standards for what students should be learning, developed tests designed to measure whether they were meeting those standards, and started thinking about how to hold schools accountable for their results.

But our goal in this country is not merely to have standards. Our goal is to help all students get ready for college, work, and citizenship. The standards are a tool, and our challenge is to use the tool to help students reach their goals.

We are starting to get a better sense of just how difficult it is going to be, and how long it is going to take.

Our foundation has been working on education issues for six years now. That means we are just getting started, and we are still trying to get it right. We are confident we have the correct objective: preparing all kids—not just a few—for bright futures. But we are still searching for the best ways to get there. 

At the foundation, we’ve found that the most successful schools around the country—schools that get every student ready for college and work—all have three things in common. We call them the new 3 R’s: rigor, relevance, and relationships.

Courses that challenge all children, not just the honors students. Motivating curricula that relate to students’ lives and aspirations. One-on-one relationships with caring adults.

Think back to your high schools. The teachers who meant the most to you were the ones who expected you to work hard and do well, made the material interesting, and showed you that they cared about how you fared and they gave you the support you needed. Well, what if all schools could give that experience to all students all of the time?

It might sound simple, but it’s not—it takes a whole new way of thinking. Great schools take concrete action to make the new 3 R’s part of students’ everyday experience.

They create small learning environments where students meet with the same advisors every day. They insist that every graduate pass a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum—that they master advanced math and English skills. And they get students excited about learning by giving them more than textbooks and workbooks.

There is a right way and a wrong way to bring these three R’s to every child in the country.

The short-term solutions would be to spend a lot of money quickly, build new schools, and declare victory. It sounds appealing, because our schools are in crisis and we want to do as much as we can as soon as we can.

But to make reform work for every child—and to make sure its benefits last—we have to take a long-term approach. For us as a foundation, that means working with partners who share our priorities and bring their own expertise to the effort.

We can only be a small part of the solution to the education crisis. Consider that the cost of running the schools in one large state—California—for one year is greater than all the assets of the Gates Foundation. If we spent every penny we have, we’d still be short 49 states, and the next year, California would be back where it started.

So we have worked with individual schools, teachers, administrators, school districts, education organizations, and state governments on everything from how schools are built, to what goes on inside the classroom.
 
North Carolina is a leader in this kind of collaborative school reform. Smart Start, your early childhood education program, is a partnership between the government and private funders, and it has been a model for other states around the country. 

In fact, Smart Start helped inspire us and many other funders in Washington state to develop Thrive by Five, a program for children under the age of five that we hope will emulate what you all have created here in North Carolina.

Our foundation is also working with something called the New Schools Project, which is redesigning 75 schools throughout your state. At the same time, Governor Mike Easley has launched the Learn and Earn effort, which will create another 75 new schools.

Over the next few years, these initiatives will give tens of thousands of kids in this state a chance at a better education.

Whatever you choose to do—whether you become an educator, a doctor, a nurse, a journalist, or an engineer—you will be a leader. As a steward of your community, the greatest service you can offer is forthright, farsighted thinking.

If you are a teacher or a principal, you can take a risk by rejecting business as usual and imagining what a really great school might look like.

If you’re a doctor or a nurse, you can live by the principle that in our world, our neighbors are no longer just the family next door or people across town.  They are AIDS sufferers in Senegal.  They are hungry children in Bangladesh. They are human beings all over the world, and billions of your neighbors need your help.

If you’re a journalist, you can cover real news about the inequities in our country and our world. You can force your readers to confront the suffering in their midst, and you can help them do something about it.

If you’re an engineer, you can help rebuild places that have been destroyed by disaster and neglect. You can build bridges in Thailand. You can build levees in New Orleans. 

Today, as you reflect on your founders—and on the success Bennett College has become—I hope you will remember what made them so extraordinary.

At a time of great hardship and great hope, they had the courage to seek out hard problems and the fortitude to try to solve them. They were leaders, and if you follow their example, then you can help make a world where hope triumphs over hardship, and where peace and justice are the order of the day.

Thank you.