ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of a school created in 2001 in St. Paul, Minnesota, as part of the $4 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college. To judge a school's effectiveness on the international stage or in a local community, the people need more than accountability in testing systems of literacy and reasoning. In consideration of active citizenship and academic service-learning, Avalon's founders emphasize the development of democratic character as an essential component of a democratic school learning community. The teachers think that modeling democratic values daily is the best way to promote and perpetuate them so that they become integral to school culture. The EdVisions experience leads the reader to believe that the new 3 Rs (relationships, relevance, and rigor) are more important than the old 3 Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic).
