The study, part of a Cato Policy Analysis, examined 200 public school districts and their accessibility to eleven selected book titles covering various perspectives on systemic racism and American values
After doing research at a total of 408 schools, of which 348 (or 85.3% of the schools) had searchable libraries, Neal McCluskey arrived to the conclusion that public school libraries may have a political bias toward the left in the book selections that they make available to pupils. On October 17, 2023, the Cato Institute published the conclusions that they had obtained from the study.
The books "Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You" by Ibram X. Kendi and "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates were considerably easier to obtain than more traditional works such as "Woke Racism" by John McWhorter and "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. In the instance of McCluskey, this was likewise the situation. Forty percent of the educational institutions that were searched through had copies of the book "Stamped," whereas only one percent of the educational institutions had copies of "Woke Racism" or "Cynical Theories."
According to McCluskey's analysis, "these findings suggest that public school libraries have a yawning left-leaning bias in acquiring books." This was the conclusion that he arrived to. This was included in a post that he made for the Cato Institute's blog.
The study then continued on to make a number of educated guesses as to why this disparity exists and what those reasons might be. It was pointed out by McCluskey that libraries do not hold a monopoly on the authority to select preferred reading material, and he made this observation. There is a possibility that their choices were influenced in some way by publications and advertising campaigns that adhere to an ideology that leans to the left. The findings of the research showed that there was a potential that the outcomes of the study would have been different if there had been a bigger pool of books to choose from than the eleven that were employed in the investigation.
