Program variation has long been touted as a charter school advantage, so a recent AEI report rates the diversity of charter school programs in 17 major cities. Examining charter school websites, the report finds the schools evenly split between “Specialized” schools (e.g., no excuses, STEM, or Arts) and “General” schools. It finds small to moderate correlations between city demographics and certain types of charter schools but also finds that specialized schools tend to morph into homogenized general schools. The report has several weaknesses. It claims superior diversity for charter schools but doesn’t empirically compare charter offerings with those of traditional public schools, which typically include many diverse options. Similarly, the introduction claims charter schools are hamstrung by red tape, but this is not addressed in the report. Also, as acknowledged in the report, coding schools based on website descriptions is an error-prone enterprise, yet no check of the accuracy of the data is provided. As the correlations between charter schools and city demographics are based on only 17 cases (cities are the unit of analysis), this is too weak a base to support the report’s conclusions. Fundamentally, the report does not make the case for its major claims, and thus has only minimal utility.

These two reports focus on the need for more effective principals to improve school qual­ity. Each includes a sensible discussion of workplace conditions affecting the principal pipeline and contributing to leadership effectiveness. Great Principals at Scale recom­mends better school and district alignment of goals and strategies, along with district-pro­vided support structures and greater local autonomy for principals. Lacking Leaders examines the hiring practices in five school districts and identifies ineffective hiring prac­tices as contributing to a pipeline problem; it argues that attracting the best candidates will require additional remuneration, greater autonomy over staffing decisions, and in­creased district-level collaboration. The headline policy recommendation is to increase salaries $100,000 above current levels to attract more effective principals into the pipe­line. No research in the report, however, justifies the size of the salary recommendation or demonstrates salary as the most important factor influencing principal recruitment, selec­tion, or retention. Also, while both reports focus on the principal as the primary source of leadership in schools, neither considers other important sources of leadership. Both re­ports suggest leadership and management skills found in many organizational settings outside of education are easily or directly transferable to education. This suggestion, how­ever, underestimates the human context of teaching and learning. These and other limita­tions undermine the usefulness of the reports’ resulting recommendations.