catalyst-chicago.org

After years of teaching history in Chicago Public Schools, Kim Day concluded poor children of color were disconnected from the communities they lived in as well as the world outside their neighborhoods.

"Part of education is teaching children how to operate outside of school," Day says.

Day and colleague Diana Shulla-Cose thought it would be a good idea to get their students off campus weekly and out of town periodically. But they didn't think their idea would fly inside the CPS bureaucracy, since just arranging a limited number of field trips took a ton of paperwork.

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Chicago's latest school autonomy effort appears to be an emperor with no clothes. Now in its second year, the Autonomous Management and Performance Schools initiative, better known as AMPS, offers schools a measure of freedom as reward for a track record of sound operations and high student achievement. But just how much freedom do they get? Not much more, at this point, than what's available to regular public schools.

Of the 10 "autonomies" originally offered to AMPS schools, only three—budget flexibility, the option to drop area oversight and the freedom to train new teachers in-...

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.

Second, the extra $100,000 he received would give students after-school tutoring and more classes to catch up in earning credits. Banks also hired a second...