More fear mongering about the “left” from the Cato Institute.
The subtext is , as always, is that the “left” whatever that is these days, is “Un-American”.
They write
Over the last few years, there has been a surge in challenges to books in public school libraries. These “banning” battles have drawn considerable attention – and alarm – but they miss deeper questions: How do public schools select books in the first place, and do they offer a balance of opinions on controversial issues?
Findings in a Cato Policy Analysis released today, “Are Public School Libraries Accomplishing Their Mission?” suggest that public schools do not tend to stock a balance of views, but lean, perhaps strongly, to the left.
To test whether public school libraries carry balanced viewpoints, we randomly selected 200 “regular” public school districts (no charter schools or special districts) and looked for eleven titles in libraries serving middle and high schools. We selected books seeking a balance of views on race and the fundamental nature of American society.
Basically, is the country grounded in liberty and equality, or has it always suffered from systemic racism?
As the figure above shows, we were far more likely to find titles that suggest the country suffers from systemic racism – books in the Stamped series by Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta??Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me – than books that take issue with the thrust of Kendi’s and Coates’s arguments, or that present the United States as fundamentally good.
The titles directly addressing the kinds of arguments put forth by Kendi and Coates are Woke Racism by John McWhorter and Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. Books in the Rush Revere series by Rush Limbaugh represent the view that the United States is fundamentally good.
Far more schools had libraries that made the Kendi and Coates books available than the others. Especially stark was that almost 40 percent of schools with searchable libraries – 135 total – had access to Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, but less than 1 percent had access to Woke Racism or Cynical Theories. Each of those conservative books was found in just one school.
And as seen in the next figure, when we broke districts down by the 2020 presidential election winner in their county, schools in Trump??won counties were much more likely to stock at least one Rush Revere title than in Biden??won areas. But more schools in Trump??won counties held Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and Between the World and Me than held a Rush Revere book.
Read more
https://www.cato.org/blog/deeper-banning-possible-liberal-bias-detected-public-school-libraries
