Mike Bloomberg absurdly contends that efforts to remove explicit materials from school libraries are to blame for falling public-school test scores.
Conservatives will nod in agreement to the overall gist of Mike Bloomberg’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, headlined, “Politicians should pay for ignoring America’s education crisis.” But the former mayor contends that Republican elected officials deserve a large share of the blame, a claim that stands out as spectacularly wrongheaded.
Bloomberg writes, “Republicans are spending their time trying to remove books from school libraries—in the middle of a literacy crisis. You can’t make this up. If only our biggest problem was kids reading too much.” From this wording, you would think Bloomberg was fooled by the hoax claim that a Florida middle-school library had removed every last book from the shelves out of fear of crossing Governor Ron DeSantis. Republicans aren’t arguing that kids are reading too much, or removing books willy-nilly. They’re pushing for the removal of books that are not age-appropriate, an entirely commonsense proposal.
There is no shortage of books in school libraries. Parents and Republican officials are objecting to materials such as “an illustrated memoir that contains explicit illustrations of sexual encounters involving children.”
Bloomberg continues, “Republican attacks on school libraries are part of a larger effort to use schools as a battleground for the culture war that has unfortunately become the party’s animating force. They are more focused on Critical Race Theory than the three Rs. Kids are the collateral damage.” Oh, horsepuckey. Republicans want a return to the three Rs. It is educators who insist on injecting critical race theory and other controversial, hot-button, ideologically charged topics into the curriculum. If the educators would stop trying to shoehorn political indoctrination into the education curriculum, Republicans would end their objections, and then everyone could focus on the three Rs — including the question of why “rithmetic” is the third R.
Bloomberg also takes shots at Democrats for throwing “money at the problem with no plan for actually solving it—and no oversight, accountability, and rigorous standards to ensure they do.” The op-ed reads as if the former mayor wanted to whack Democrats for terrible decision-making but felt obligated to find some way to blame Republicans, too. He decided to pretend that the catastrophic collapse in public-school test scores in recent years is primarily driven by a lack of sexually explicit materials in elementary school libraries, a nutty contention that undermines Bloomberg’s more compelling arguments.