Preliminary Findings From PEN America Show Over 10,000 Books Were Banned in Public Schools During the 2023-2024 School Year (vs. 3,362 From Previous School Year)

Note: Media coverage from AP (below) is helpful in understanding the differences in how PEN America and ALA define and count book bans/book challenges.

From PEN America:

Over 10,000 books were banned in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year, according to PEN America’s preliminary findings.

This dramatic increase is nearly triple the number from the previous school year, when PEN America recorded 3,362 bans nationwide. The final count for the 2023-2024 school year will bereleased later this fall along with a public Index of School Book Bans. PEN America will also release a detailed content analysis of titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year.

• About 8,000 book bans were recorded in Florida and Iowa, largely because of state laws. Several school districts outside of Florida and Iowa also banned heightened numbers of books this school year, such as the Elkhorn Area School District in Wisconsin, which banned more than 300 titles for several months.
• In part due to the targeting of sexual content, the stark increase includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color.
• Our numbers are certainly an undercount, as stories of book bans often go unreported. These numbers also do not account for the many reports of soft censorship, including increased hesitancy in book selection, ideologically-driven restrictions of school book purchases, the removal of classroom collections, and the cancellations of author visits and book fairs.

Direct to Full-Text Memo From PEN America
8 pages; PDF.

Media Coverage

Banned Books Week Starts With Mixed Messages as Reports Show Challenges Both Up and Down (via AP News)

The American Library Association found a substantial drop in 2024 so far in complaints about books stocked in public, school and academic libraries, and in the number of books receiving objections. Meanwhile, PEN America is documenting an explosion in books being removed from school shelves in 2023-24, tripling to more than 10,000 over the previous year. More than 8,000 were pulled just in Florida and Iowa, where laws restricting the content of books have been passed.

[Clip]

According to PEN, bans are tallied through local media reports, “school district websites, and school board minutes, as well as organizational partners” such as the Florida Freedom to Read Project and Let Utah Read.

The library association relies primarily on local media and accounts from public librarians. And the two organizations have differing definitions of “ban,” a key reason their numbers vary so greatly. For the ALA, a ban is the permanent removal of a book from a library’s collection. Should hundreds of books be pulled from a library for review, then returned, they are not counted as banned, but listed as a single “challenge.”

For PEN, withdrawals of any length qualify as bans.

Read the Complete AP Article

See Also: American Library Association Reveals Preliminary Data on 2024 Book Challenges (1,128 Unique Titles Challenged From Jan. 1, 2024-Aug. 31, 2024)

More Media Coverage

• New State Laws Are Fueling a Surge in Book Bans (via The NY Times)
  
• US Public Schools Banned 10,000 Books in Most Recent Academic Year (via The Guardian)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Libraries, News, Reports