Public Schools Hit Record High With Nearly 12,000 Book Bans in a Single Year
Discover how PEN America recorded nearly 12,000 public school book bans over the past year, marking a historic high driven by new laws and AI tools.
POLICY WIRE — New York, United States — Public schools across the country enacted nearly 12,000 book bans over the past year, marking an unprecedented milestone since the free expression organization PEN America began documenting removals five years ago.
For the second consecutive year, renowned author Stephen King topped the list of writers whose works were most frequently pulled from shelves.
A significant portion of these restrictions occurred in Florida and Texas, fueled by newly enacted restrictive legislation and sustained pressure from conservative activists and politicians.
Furthermore, PEN America discovered that local school district administrators are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence software to help decide which titles should be removed.
Literature addressing themes of race, racism, sexuality, and gender identity continues to face the highest volume of challenges from critics.
School libraries make knowledge and ideas available, ensure books remain available for all regardless of personal or political ideologies, and open gateways to stories that inform, challenge, and reflect the realities of the world back to readers, the PEN report, titled Banned in the USA, reads in part.
Book bans impede the freedom to read, cutting students’ access to a diversity of views, voices, perspectives, and literature they deserve to encounter.
In total, the study documented 11,982 instances of bans affecting 7,370 distinct titles, with more than 4,500 works appearing on the restricted list for the first time.
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These new additions span a broad spectrum, ranging from the 19th-century classic Jane Eyre to Sui Ishida’s popular manga series Tokyo Ghoul.
The release of Monday’s report coincides with Banned Books Week, a nationwide initiative featuring events at schools, libraries, and other community spaces to draw attention to rising censorship trends.
Books written by King were pulled a total of 312 times, with well-known titles such as The Shining and The Green Mile facing the brunt of the actions.
Meanwhile, the single most targeted individual work was Patrick McCormick’s novel Sold, which chronicles the story of a young girl sold into sexual slavery in India and recorded 25 separate removals.
Other frequently targeted titles include Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale, Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning novel Speak about a traumatized teenager, and Ellen Hopkins’ book Crank, which explores drug addiction.
Both PEN America and the American Library Association have documented dramatic surges in book restrictions since the early 2020s, though the two organizations utilize different tracking methodologies.
While PEN counts any book removed even temporarily as a ban, the library association restricts its count solely to titles that have been permanently pulled.
According to the American Library Association’s most recent findings published in April, approximately 5,600 instances of book bans occurred during the prior year.
Reporting by Policy-Wire (PW)
