It's time to stop demonizing teachers.

Some people, finally, are beginning to get it. Within the last 48 hours, two nationally-recognized columnists at two of the nation's largest papers have come to the defense of teachers.

Pulitzer-prize winner Eugene Robinson begins his column, Standing up for teachers, in the Washington Post this way: "It has become fashionable to blame all of society’s manifold sins and wickedness on “teachers unions,” as if it were possible to separate these supposedly evil organizations from the dedicated public servants who belong to them. News flash: Collective bargaining is not the problem, and taking that right away from teachers will not fix the schools."

Robinson says that the Chicago teachers have dug in their heels, but "I’d dig in, too, if I were constantly being lectured by self-righteous crusaders whose knowledge of the inner-city schools crisis comes from a Hollywood movie."

"The fact is that teachers are being saddled with absurdly high expectations. Some studies have shown a correlation between student performance and teacher “effectiveness,” depending how this elusive quality is measured. But there is a whole body of academic literature proving the stronger correlation between student performance and a much more important variable: family income."

"Yes, I’m talking about poverty. Sorry to be so gauche, but when teachers point out the relationship between income and achievement, they’re not shirking responsibility. They’re just stating an inconvenient truth."

Robinson continues: "The brie-and-chablis “reform” movement would have us believe that most of the teachers in low-income, low-performing schools are incompetent — and, by extension, that most of the teachers in upper-crust schools, where students perform well, are paragons of pedagogical virtue."

"It is reasonable to hold teachers accountable for their performance. But it is not reasonable — or, in the end, productive — to hold them accountable for factors that lie far beyond their control....portraying teachers as villains doesn’t help a single child. Ignoring the reasons for the education gap in this country is no way to close it. And there’s a better way to learn about the crisis than going to the movies. Visit a school instead."

Joe Nocera used to cover the financial beat for the NY Times and is the author of a book about the recent financial crisis. He is now a regular columnist for the NYT, whose column yesterday was titled How to fix the schools. Nocera quotes Marc Tucker: "It is not possible to make progress with your students if you are at war with your teachers."

"Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do — places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits — almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so."

" [Tucker's] starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy — i.e., how to teach — nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job — because they’ve never learned the right techniques.)"

"What is also a given in other countries is that teaching has a status equal to other white-collar professionals. That was once true in America, but Tucker believes that a quarter-century of income inequality saw teachers lose out at the expense of lawyers and other well-paid professionals. That is a large part of the reason that teachers’ unions have become so obstreperous: It is not just that they feel underpaid, but they feel undervalued. "

"Second, he believes that it makes no sense to demonize unions. “If you look at the countries with the highest performance, many of them have very strong unions. There is no correlation between the strength of the unions and student achievement,” he says."

"High-performing countries don’t abandon teacher standards. On the contrary. Teachers who feel part of a collaborative effort are far more willing to be evaluated for their job performance — just like any other professional. It should also be noted that none of the best-performing countries rely as heavily as the U.S. does on the blunt instrument of standardized tests. That is yet another lesson we have failed to learn."

That word "collaborative" is part of the key. In the 70's and 80's the Japanese were producing manufactured goods (cars in particular) which were much higher in quality than anything produced in America. Eventually, American manufacturers caught on to what made Japanese manufacturing superior: When problems developed, the Japanese knew that the people closest to the problem almost always knew more about how to solve it than the bosses and engineers in their offices.

Between Sept. 21 and 28, NBC is holding its yearly "Education Nation" conference. There will be reports each evening on the NBC Nightly News. If you see reports about assembling a collection of America's best teachers to work on a solution to our education problems you will know that we are on our way. If it's a collection of billionaires and business leaders leading the discussion, we'll still have a long way to go to solve our problems.