USA public schools book bans rise by 200%, affecting over 10K titles

More than 10,000 books were banned in public schools nationwide during the 2023-2024 school year, marking a “dramatic” 200% increase over the previous year, PEN America said Friday.

Some 43% of the book ban cases, or 4,295 bans, were instances in which books were completely prohibited from access, ineligible for either a review or for availability with newly imposed restrictions, the freedom of expression group found in its new report, Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves.

The instances of complete bans as a percentage of all school book bans rose 16 percentage points in 2023-24 (43%) compared to prior years (27%), the report found.

Since 2021, PEN America says it has counted close to 16,000 instances of book bans in public schools.

“This crisis is tragic for young people hungry to understand the world they live in and see their identities and experiences reflected in books,” the group’s Freedom to Read program director Kasey Meehan said in a statement.

“The passage of time when you’re in 6th grade or 11th grade is very fast — with much to learn about,” he added “What students can read in schools provides the foundation for their lives, whether critical thinking, empathy across difference, personal well-being, or long-term success.

“The defense of the core principles of public education and the freedom to read, learn, and think is as necessary now as ever.”

Blaming what it called “individuals and groups espousing extreme conservative viewpoints,” PEN America said the most-targeted titles were those dealing with themes of race, sexuality and gender identity — similar to previous years.

A new, emerging category of banned books are those that “depict topics young people confront in the real world,” such as substance abuse, suicide, depression, mental health concerns and sexual violence, the group found.

Florida and Iowa led the nation in the number of school book bans. Florida prohibited more than 4,500 titles while Iowa banned more than 3,600. Across the country, 29 states and 220 public school districts issued documented bans during the 2023-2024 school year, according to the report.

The most frequently banned books were Nineteen Minutes by best-selling author Jodi Picoult, Looking for Alaska by John Green, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Sold by Patricia McCormick and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.

Nineteen Minutes is a 2007 bestseller about a school shooting. Its author, Jodi Picoult, said the quickly rising number of book bans is “a call for alarm.”

“Nineteen Minutes is banned not because it’s about a school shooting, but because of a single page that depicts a date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body,” she said. “It is not gratuitous or salacious, and it is not — as the book banners claim — porn.

“In fact, hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them,” Picoult added.