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Instead of a courtroom or Loop high-rise, Errol Stone now spends most of his workday in classrooms and hallways at Legacy Charter in North Lawndale, the school launched in 2005 by law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal to commemorate its centennial. Sonnenschein pledged to spend $1 million to get Legacy off the ground; now, Stone says, the firm plans to put an additional $3 million toward construction of a new building for the school, which shares space with Mason Elementary. Sonnenschein is so far the only corporate institution to take up Mayor Richard M.

David Banks, the founder of New York City's first all-boys high school, was thrilled about the freedom—and cash—he got by signing on as one of the first crop of what the district is calling empowerment schools.

First and foremost, he would be exempt from meetings that took too much time away from running his school, the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx. "That was my primary motivation for joining," Banks says.

After years of being stuck in neutral in Chicago, the notion that teachers know best how to evaluate and train other teachers is finally taking a toehold in the district.

This fall, the teachers union and the district are piloting a peer mentoring and evaluation program at eight union-run public schools, dubbed "Fresh Start" schools. The 125 new teachers at these schools will take part this year, but tenured teachers who have been given "unsatisfactory" performance ratings will be required to participate next year.