Education today is increasingly focused on tests and testing. Teachers
are being judged on how much they can increase test scores from one year
to the next. These year-to-year gains in scores are part of a
"value-added" approach to teacher evaluation, and value-added teacher
assessment is all the rage now. A main point of this book is that while
teachers do add value when they enable students to increase their
performance on standardized tests, this is neither the only nor the most
important value they add. An analysis of 40 years of data on teachers
suggests that an equally if not more important value added is their
contribution to the stability of our increasingly unsteady democracy.
Teachers help steady modern democracy by teaching children the limits of
liberty and by cultivating the social virtues--trust, cooperation,
helpfulness, and the like--upon which civil society depends. We need not
only to recognize this but also to avoid education policies that
undermine their willingness and ability to do so.