Despite the fact that the majority of Americans do not support book bans, they have been skyrocketing in the U.S., with a new report from PEN America recording a 33% year-over-year increase in book bans in American public school classrooms and libraries. The report partially attributes that rise to a handful of growing conservative advocacy groups, whose members go to great lengths to push for the removal of books at school board meetings and with school districts.
PEN America’s report recorded 3,362 instances of book bans during the 2022-2023 school year, affecting at least 1,557 unique titles. During the 2021-2022 school year, the free speech advocacy organization tracked 2,532 such instances. The report also found that 30% of book bans apply to books that represent LGBTQ+ identities, with 6% of all book bans affecting books with trans characters specifically.
The organization says that three advocacy groups have been particularly active in pushing these bans forward: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education. The largest by far of the three is Moms for Liberty, which formed in Florida in 2021 and now has 284 chapters in 44 states. The group enjoys the support of some of the most influential Republican politicians; Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy all spoke at the Moms for Liberty conference in July. PEN America’s report found that 81% of all of the school districts in the U.S. that have enacted book bans are in or adjacent to a county where there is an active chapter of at least one of these groups.
As the report notes, these groups have also worked to influence state legislation. Moms for Liberty and Citizens Defending Freedom advocated for the expansion of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which initially banned discussions of LGBTQ+ people and culture from K-3rd grade classrooms. In April, the Florida State Board of Education voted to expand the law to apply all the way up through 12th grade. DeSantis, in fact, appointed a member of Moms for Liberty to the Board of Education in March 2022. In September, the Florida governor appointed the organization’s co-founder, Tina Descovich, to the Florida Commission on Ethics.
State legislation, namely “educational intimidation bills,” as PEN America calls them, has also served to accelerate the implementation of school book bans. Broadly speaking, these bills work to indirectly censor school materials by creating a “chilling” effect. This means that much of this legislation (including “Don’t Say Gay”) is overly broad or vaguely worded, which leads educators to self-censor for fear of violating the law. The report notes that of the 33 states that have enacted bans this past school year, eight enacted an “educational intimidation bill” that took effect within the past year. A whopping 63% of all book bans recorded in the report occurred in those eight states.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Florida is the state with the highest number of bans, at 1,406. The next states with the most bans are Texas (625), Missouri (333), Utah, (281), and Pennsylvania (186). The report points out that, with the exception of Utah, each one of these states has the presence of a national advocacy group. All but one of these five states have passed legislation that would likely lead to book bans.
“These pressures work in tandem: school leaders, educators, librarians, and school boards report how fear has driven their efforts to comply with vaguely worded legislation, and this is in part because these bills also strengthen the tools that local advocacy groups can use to challenge books and pressure compliance with their censorious demands,” the report reads.
While many of the bans are indeed concentrated in Florida, Kasey Meehan, PEN America’s Freedom to Read program director and the lead author of the report, said in a press release that the state “isn’t an anomaly.”
“It’s providing a playbook for other states to follow suit,” Meehan said. “Students have been using their voices for months in resisting coordinated efforts to suppress teaching and learning about certain stories, identities, and histories; it’s time we follow their lead.”
Thankfully, some groups are heeding that call: the progressive advocacy group Run for Something announced on Wednesday that it would be spending $10 million on school board races over the next five years, with the explicit goal of combatting right-wing extremism.
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