[Nyororin]

I agree that the future of learning English lies largely in the hands of non-native teachers... But not for the same reasons outlined in this thread so far. I fee, that way simply because most of the time, the first exposure to English is with a non-native teacher. Most English teachers in Japan are not native speakers. English conversation teachers almost always are, but the majority does not go to conversation classes. They go to regular school, where the regular English classes are overwhelmingly taught by non-native speakers.

If you improve the base - in this case the non-native teachers - you improve everything. Therefore I feel that improving the quality of the non-native teachers will go a lot further than just throwing native speakers and hoping something will stick.

In terms of value; a qualified native speaker is better than a qualified non-native speaker is better than a non-qualified native speaker is better than a non-qualified non-native speaker.
There are a lot more non-native teachers who could have their skills improved, but not many truly qualified native speaking teachers...