There are poor teachers, to be sure, and I’m convinced the teaching profession in this country must police itself more vigorously. I’ve thought sometimes that an incompetent teacher is worse than an incompetent surgeon, since a surgeon can cut up only one person at a time. However, it is also true that no profession is made healthy by focusing only on what’s bad, and we must begin to see teachers as part of the solution, not the problem. Perhaps we can learn something from Japanese here. Teachers in that country, are heroes of the culture. If we do so, we may come closer to identifying the reason for the differences in school performance in our two countries.