School autonomy, school-based management and decentralization have been in the center of educational policies all over the world for the last decades. Portugal was no exception to this international trend. Yet, although the discourse of school autonomy began to appear in the 80's- together with some legal dispositions with no major impact in school practices-it was only from the end of the 90's (and in the turn to the XXIst century) that some concrete changes were attempted in order to place the schools in the center of the educational system, at least according to the official rethoric.This article discusses some conclusions from an empirical study on school autonomy discourses in Portugal in a period of school management restructuring with the purposes of decentralizing the school system, installing school-based management and, consequently, reinforcing school autonomy. The interpretative analysis addressed not only the intrinsicacies of both the political/official discourse and the discourses produced by school actors involved in such changes. As most of the discourses are about practices, or captured from their natural environment of discursive practices, the study allowed to uncover the rhetorics of the politics of education as well as to observe some of the expressions of such politics in school practices. The analysis of the discursive data pertaining to intertextualities and connections by reference to a particular context of production also made possible the identification of several regulation modes. Indeed, discourse about school autonomy reached different levels and instances of transnational, national, micro-regulation and control features. In such a multi-regulation context, some school actors found it difficult to innovate their schools' pathways towards the construction of school autonomy.