Thousands of books removed from schools out of fear of state governments nationwide. Judy Blume’s Forever…banned from every Utah public school; To Kill a Mockingbird and 39 other titles pulled from a Texas school district that used AI to review materials; a list of 400 titles removed in one district quietly circulated in Tennessee as a resource for other school administrators to find books to ban; 22 titles barred from all South Carolina school districts after the state board of education deemed them inappropriate.
To date, PEN America has recorded nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools since 2021, and while book bans are not new, an explosion of well-organized, political organizations putting pressure on local school districts and library boards marked the emergence of something unprecedented. By 2022, these highly localized efforts converged with the passage of state-level legislation: educational gag orders,educational intimidation bills, and other state proposals seeking to suppress free expression in education. Some laws imposed direct prohibitions on instruction by restricting teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities; others used indirect means to chill speech, such as criminal punishments and other penalties. Taken together, state laws inflamed a campaign to ban books.
In this policy brief, we describe the evolving ways in which state laws are propelling book bans at the local level and the impact they are having on schools and students. Ignited by misleading “parents rights” rhetoric, coupled with moral panic over what’s in schools, organizations and elected officials have proposed and enacted laws designed to censor. Following a blueprint that originated from Florida politics, the results chip away libraries’ autonomy, students’ right to read, and public education as we know it.
