As in many European countries (Eurydice 2008) recent school reforms in German speaking countries have aimed to “modernise” the governance of schooling (see Bruesemeister/Eubel 2003) by successive waves of policies, such as “school autonomy”, “educational standards” and increasing system accountability by testing student performance and new models of “school inspection” (see Altrichter/Maag Merki forthcoming). All in all, the main thrust of the reform has been to weaken a state-led “bureaucratic” coordination of the school system. As a consequence, we assume that there is an increasing need for alternative mechanisms of system coordination. In the first part of the paper we discuss possible alternatives to “bureaucratic-hierarchical” coordination of schooling, such as coordination through “competition/markets” (Czada 2007), through “networks” (Wald/Jansen 2007) or through “communities” (Glaeser 2007). In the second part of the paper we turn to a corpus of 11 case studies on Austrian secondary schools which have used the opportunities for in-school decision-making provided by “school autonomy legislation” for developing specific "school profiles" (eg. in ICT, Languages, Arts and Creativity; see Altrichter/Soukup-Altrichter 2008). We use this empirical material to see (i)whether or not changes in the coordination of education processes and (ii) what changes have occurred on two levels a.between schools and b.within schools between staff and students. These changes will be discussed in the light of possible coordination mechanisms outlined above.