The Normalization of Book Banning

Introduction

In 2025, book censorship in the United States is rampant and common. Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.

The book bans that have accumulated in the past four years are unprecedented and undeniable. This report looks back at the 2024-2025 school year – the fourth school year in the contemporary campaign to ban books – and illustrates the continued attacks on books, stories, identities, and histories.  

This report offers a window into the complex and extensive climate of censorship between July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. Our reporting on book bans remains a bellwether of a larger campaign to restrict and control education and public narratives, wreaking havoc on our public schools and democracy. 

The State of Book Bans

Two things help us make sense of the world – information and stories. Both explain, describe, and give language to the world we encounter. It is not a surprise then that banning books is a way of erasing stories, identities, experiences, and peoples and reshaping understandings of the past. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop warns: “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” 

Stories tell us who we are and who we can become. 

This right – the right to discover – is being taken from students under the guise of their “protection.” Over the past four years, a misleading campaign to “protect children” alongside advocacy for “parental rights” has been weaponized to diminish students’ First Amendment rights in schools, sow distrust in librarians and educators, and diminish the ability of authors and illustrators to connect with their intended audiences. In this upside down world, any rights of young people as students are somehow subservient to the absolute rights of their parents. 

In 2022, we cautioned that book bans and related threats to free expression and the First Amendment should not be ignored; that this assault on students’ freedom to read is a slippery slope; and that state censorship of this nature, once unleashed, would snowball. Today, that escalation is no longer hypothetical. For many students, families, educators, librarians, and school districts, book banning is a new normal. 

This change didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t a fluke of history. National and local groups touting extreme conservative views have played on parents’ fears and anxieties to exert ideological control over public education across the United States using consistent and coordinated tactics. These groups’ efforts have catalyzed censorial trends and a full-blown attack on public schools and democracy. This “Ed Scare,” as PEN America has termed it, has produced changes at the local, state – and increasingly, federal – levels at a frighteningly rapid pace, resulting in new policies that not only diminish students’ right to read and learn, but also take away protections for educators and librarians. Together, these trends are having a profound impact on the literary community and the country at large. 

As a result of these groups and their political allies, book censorship in schools has reached a new apex, now becoming a routine and expected part of school operations, particularly in states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. And it is being anticipated on the horizon for educators and families in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. While we explore the specific trends that have led us to this escalated climate of censorship in this report, it is important to remember the big picture. These attacks on students’ rights and educational institutions are the symptoms of a much larger disease: the dismantling of public education and a backsliding democracy.

Key Trends from the 2024-2025 School Year

In the fourth year of book bans, several key trends stood out this year: 

Federal efforts to restrict education use rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books. In 2025, a new vector of book banning pressure has appeared – the federal government. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has mimicked rhetoric about “parents’ rights”, which, in Florida and other states, has largely been used to advance book bans and censorship of schools, against the wishes of many parents, students, families, and educators. Under the guise of “returning education to parents,” President Trump has released a series of Executive Orders (EOs) mainly: “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism,” and “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.” 

Although none of these EOs take a direct aim at books, they were used as justification for the July 2025 removal of almost 600 books from Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools on military bases. In restricting discussion of transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion and barring schools from “promoting un-American ideas,” books like ABC of Equality by Chana Ewing or several volumes from the series Heartstopper by Alice Oseman were removed from access. Students and their families responded by suing. 

In addition to the efforts from the White House, the U.S. Department of Education declared book bans “a hoax,” parroting language from state leaders like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. The Department removed a federal position within the Office of Civil Rights set up to investigate allegations of discriminatory book bans and issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to “cease using race preferences and stereotypes” or risk federal funding. Although federal judges prohibit the enforcement of the letter, several state leaders already acknowledged compliance with the directive. 

And while the the Department of Education chills speech and expression across public schools, the “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities” EO simultaneously facilitates the closure of the Department of Education. In doing so, the EO aims to transfer educational authority back to the states and local governments. Without any federal oversight, states will have carte blanche to impose ideological control over public education. 

The rhetoric of the Trump Administration and the directives of the Departments of Education and Defense add yet another pressure on states and school districts to censor. 

Persistent attacks conflate LGBTQ+ identities as “sexually explicit” and erase LGBTQ+ representation from schools. Since book challenges and removals exploded in 2021, books depicting same-sex and trans identities have been conflated as inherently “sexual.” In sexualizing LGBTQ+ people, swaths of literature have been removed under the premise of removing “inappropriate” or “obscene” books. 

Efforts to ban children’s picture books especially illuminate the perniciousness of this attack. We have tracked and reported on how book banners claim that picture books like And Tango Makes Three, Everywhere Babies, The Family Book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, or The Purim Superhero are “sexually explicit,” merely for including LGBTQ+ identities. Nationally, there is evidence that extreme conservative groups have continued to circulate reports to schools with these claims, putting pressure – and providing cover – for district leaders to ban books on that basis. 

The inclusion of LGBTQ+ books in classroom and school libraries was at the center of a United States Supreme Court case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, which was decided this summer. This case asked whether or not Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland must allow parental notifications and opt-out if lessons related to gender and sexuality might violate a family’s religious beliefs. During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch reflected derogatory and misinformed views, often repeated by book banners – when discussing the children’s alphabet book, Pride Puppy, he referred to the presence of a leather jacket as evidence of “bondage” and drag queens as “sex workers.”

The ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, to mandate “opt outs” for children whose parents object to LGBTQ+-relevant picture books, forecasts heightened censorship of LGBTQ+ content across school districts nationwide. Rather than offering histories, stories, and books that reflect all students and families, LGBTQ+ stories will be omitted from classrooms. LGBTQ+ students and their families will effectively be denied the freedom to read about themselves and those around them. 

One trend has remained constant throughout these four years: Many of these book bans are not due to decisions made in reconsideration policies and processes. Nor are they the direct result of legislation. As noted in PEN America’s first Banned in the USA report, just 4% of books banned in 2021-2022 followed the recommended processes for reconsideration and challenges of books in school districts. For the 2024-2025 school year, vast numbers of the books removed from shelves – pending investigation and permanently banned – came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators, and educators. Within our Title Level Index, described below, PEN America identified 2,520 book ban cases where the bans were influenced by pressure imposed from the presence or threat of state laws. Out of those, however, only 3% of the bans were triggered by a law requiring the removal of a book – the rest, 97%, came from bans caused by the fear that districts had of being out of compliance, regardless of whether the law was enjoined, hadn’t been passed yet, or didn’t call for the direct removal of books. This functions as a form of “obeying in advance” to anticipated restrictions from the state or administrative authorities, rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial.

State-mandated bans are challenging to quantify but we can estimate the impact on students, and that impact is significant. In 2024, Utah and South Carolina introduced mechanisms to create state-mandated “no read” lists. Tennessee also enacted such a mechanism in 2024; however, it has not been used. Although we cannot verify if every district had copies of the book titles now prohibited in school libraries, we can estimate the scale of restrictions on the freedom to read.

In Utah, to trigger a statewide ban, each of the 18 titles on the state’s “no read” list had to have been previously labeled as “objectionable content” and banned in at least three school districts, or two school districts and five charter schools. There are 41 public school districts in Utah and over 100 public charter schools. Each of Utah’s 18 titles were banned at least three times before being added to the “no read” list (totaling 54 bans), and if each of these 18 titles was available in each of these 41 districts, and subsequently banned, then that would amount to an astonishing 738 bans overall. 

In South Carolina, the State Board of Education can decide to ban a book statewide following an appeal by those dissatisfied with a district’s decision to retain a challenged title, or the board can choose to review a title on their own initiative. Once books are listed on the state’s “no read” list, those books become prohibited in all school districts. South Carolina has 81 school districts. That means that the 22 unique titles were banned at least 22 times; but if they were present in every district, and then subsequently banned, that would number 1,782 bans across South Carolina. Taken together, the “no read” lists in South Carolina and Utah may have triggered over 2,500 cases of book bans.  

Where there are everyday book bans, there is also everyday resistance. For the first time in our tracking, we catalogued the robust network of advocates fighting back publicly against censorship in defense of the freedom to read. Of the 87 districts impacted by book bans this year, 70 contained evidence of a public response against censorship, whether from individuals, organized groups, or whole communities. Often, it is parents, individual authors, students, educators, librarians, and community members who have been instrumental in creating the most local and direct pressure to return books to shelves. Their resistance is supported by district-specific groups, such as Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, Marietta in the Middle, and Freedom to Read Coalition of Columbia County. We also tracked state-level groups putting out fires in almost every district in their states, including Florida Freedom to Read Project, Texas Freedom to Read Project, Let Utah Read, Annie’s Foundation, ACLU state affiliates, Families Against Book Bans, and Fight for the First state and local affiliates. Other times, national organizations were publicly outspoken about district-level bans supporting these state and local efforts, such as National Coalition Against Censorship, Authors Against Book Bans, the ACLU, EveryLibrary, American Booksellers for Free Expression, the Author’s Guild, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and Military Families for Free Expression. Truly, no one fighting book censorship in schools is doing so alone, and many individuals, coalitions, and organizations are actively pushing back. 

Books Bans by the Numbers

During the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America recorded 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts.

When taken all together, since July 2021, our Index records 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.

The numbers are only part of the story. As we report on the fourth year of the book banning crisis, it is important to note the limitations of our data collection and reporting: 

• First, the numbers documented here represent cases of school book bans reported directly to PEN America and/or covered in the media. As indicated in our methodology, the data presented in this report is not comprehensive, as there are likely additional school book bans that have not been reported. Further, it is important to note that books are also banned within public libraries and prisons, but those do not appear within this index.
• Second, school districts commonly copy one another, and pull the same book titles from their shelves. Lists of book titles are circulated online by individuals, groups, and even school districts, calling for them to be culled. As a result, commonly banned books from past years simply aren’t available in many school libraries anymore.
• Third, each school year PEN America’s Index captures a snapshot of books that were removed within that particular year – where a triggering action led to a ban on a particular book title. Although many titles remain banned year after year, PEN America’s Index does not count these cases. Therefore, books removed during previous school years that are still prohibited are not counted within this school year’s Index. Our data instead chronicles the books removed from shelves within the last school year. 
• Lastly, strategic pressure from groups, school districts, and state legislation accelerate book bans, causing spikes where hundreds of books get banned all at once and shelves are emptied. These bans are difficult to count comprehensively, as often the total number of titles affected by these sweeping bans are not reported.

New This Year: Title, District, and State Mandated Ban Indexes

In addition, this year, Banned in the USA also includes three Indexes of School Book Bans – the Title-Level Index, as released for the past four years, the District-Level Index, and the State-Mandated Bans Index.t

1. Title-Level Index: This index lists all titles banned within school districts, as collected by PEN America, and is most similar to data presented in previous years.

2. District-Level Index: This index presents data on book bans by district, including the total number of books banned, sources of pressure to ban books, and pushback against book bans at the district level where it can be identified. While similar to the Title-Level Index, this Index includes some districts for which information on specific titles banned was not publicly available, but where the total number of banned books and/ or an official acknowledgement that books were removed was documented. 

3. State-Mandated Bans Index: This Index captures an unprecedented phenomenon in the book banning crisis – the removal of specific books from all public schools statewide due to state policies in Utah and South Carolina. As described above, these policies, enacted in 2024, introduced mechanisms to create state-mandated “no read” lists. Tennessee is the third state that enacted such a mechanism in 2024; however, it has not yet been reported as used. For this category of state-level book bans, PEN America cannot verify if every district had a copy of the books that are now prohibited in school libraries, and therefore we do not include these bans within our title- and district-level indexes.

Together, these three Indexes demonstrate the variety of ways in which books are today being banned in school districts – in some cases because of state legislative mandates far beyond local districts’ control. These Indexes also illustrate the shocking enormity of the book banning crisis’ effect on unique book titles, authors and illustrators, students, parents, schools and school districts. 

Most Banned Titles

No title is safe as long as book banning efforts continue. This 2024-2025 school year, book bans affected 3,752 unique titles in 87 school districts nationwide. Some types of books are targeted for removal because of their content; but the climate of censorship that has spread in schools has impacted a wide array of titles written for all sorts of audiences. Access to literature prepares our youth to confront the real world, offering a window into experiences otherwise unknown to them. However, diverse ideas and stories featuring protagonists from historically marginalized identities are often the first topics targeted by censors. 

As lists of titles to remove continue to be circulated online, greater restrictions are implemented at the local and state levels, censorship rises, and students’ rights are violated. 

Where the Book Bans are Happening

During the 2024-2025 school year, our Index of School Book Bans documented bans in 87 public school districts and 23 states. 

Florida led the nation with 2,304 instances of book bans for the 2024-2025 school year, owing to the passage of multiple vague laws, direct pressure from local groups and elected officials, and threats to educators’ professional licenses if they fail to comply. In holding the state accountable for censorship in their public schools, Florida Freedom to Read Project maintains an extensive system for tracking and reporting book bans, offering a blueprint for pushing back against censorship. As stated above, where there is everyday banning, there is everyday resistance. 

Overall, in the course of the last four school years, book bans occurred in 45 states and 451 public school districts.

No school library will be left untouched if local and state policies and pressures continue to foster a climate of censorship. In fact, the magnified number of book ban instances in these states is largely due to pressure campaigns by censorship-minded groups and individuals in local districts coupled with emerging state legislation. The chilled environment enables attacks on freedom of speech and our democracy to persist.

Authors and Illustrators Impacted

The damage caused by book bans doesn’t stop at the infringement of students’ free speech rights and restrictions to the freedom to read. In their wake, book bans also leave a detrimental mark on thousands of creative people in the literary world. Throughout the 2024-2025 school year, book bans affected the works of almost 2,600 artists, including 2,308 authors, 243 illustrators and 38 translators. 

As with books, a subset of authors are more susceptible to book bans than others. The majority of the authors whose books are overwhelmingly targeted often explore themes with race and racism, gender identity and sexuality, or depict sexual violence in their work. During the 2024-2025 school year, the works of the ten most commonly banned authors account for 13% of all book ban instances. 

Overview of Impacted Artists
Authors	2,308
Illustrators	243
Translators	38
Total Unique Impacted Creatives	2,589

Several of these authors have penned multiple titles and been branded with a “Scarlet Letter” – a phenomenon dubbed by PEN America where a ban on one title from a specific author is followed by efforts to ban their entire collection. Book bans leave authors at increased financial risk due to a reduction in school visits or events, and the potential subsequent impact on their future book sales. Some authors have reported the emotional impacts of these book bans on their creativity, citing concerns about potential blowback to future works, which cause them to feel the need to self-censor. In this way, the book banning campaign has had an impact that ranges far beyond the specific titles and school districts, ultimately leaving many readers without access to current stories, and jeopardizing the stories yet to be imagined by these creators. 

Takeaways

This year’s report is underlaid by urgency as campaigns, directives, and laws impelling censorship stretch across districts and states, and – more recently – are adopted by the Trump Administration and other federal agencies. In examining the fourth year of the book banning crisis, we note the following takeaways: 

1. The campaign to censor books is increasingly routine as individuals and boards capitulate to rapidly expanding pressures to remove books. In 2021, the book banning crisis was mostly centered around school boards as special-interest groups and individuals lobbied school board members to remove books based on the content and identities represented in certain titles. Over the last several years, censorship pressures have expanded and escalated, taking on different forms. State legislatures passed laws restricting educational materials and library books. State superintendents or departments of education issued directives to schools, causing confusion, and called out school leaders and librarians to remove educational materials. Elected leaders issued lists of books containing “explicit” material, demanding schools remove them. Groups made accusations of “porn in schools” to police and sheriffs departments, creating another form of pressure locally to ban certain titles. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through “do not buy” lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. Administrators find it safer to remove a book in the face of pressure than fight for its belonging on library shelves, and educators and librarians admit to omitting books that may be objectionable. 
   
   From a birds’ eye view, school districts today are surrounded by multiple and persistent local, state, and now federal pressures to ban books, with diminishing reasons not to. The result is a kind of everyday banning – the normalization and routinization of censorship as an expected part of public education in many parts of the country. Opposing this will no longer take just counter-efforts to any one of these threats; it will require a similarly committed effort, rooted in recognition of the fundamental right to read.

2. Book bans harm public school systems and restrict education. Book bans are the result of coordinated campaigns by individuals and groups, some of whom harbor homophobic, white supremacist, and Christian nationalist views. The onslaught of these campaigns upon public schools is an attack on the very purpose of public education – to educate all students, to generate empathy and understanding for an informed citizenry, and to serve as a great equalizer for students from all backgrounds. 
   
   Persistent book ban campaigns undermine the time available for educators to dedicate to quality instruction and often can subject them to harassment and vitriol. It means educators and librarians must spend greater hours cataloging books and dedicate more administrative time overseeing processes that comply with vague legislation. It also means that districts are accruing significant legal costs to navigate lawsuits that seek to protect the civil rights of students and enforce constitutional protections and are facing burdensome demands on educators to increase transparency and provide parents with alternative options. 
   
   Book bans are reported to decrease students’ engagement in reading, discourage students’ critical thinking, and interfere with a teacher’s ability to teach. Book bans and other efforts to limit and restrict education also strain systems that are already overwhelmed, as schools face teacher shortages, funding cuts, chronic absenteeism, and ongoing learning loss exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The escalation of the attacks on books has detrimental impacts on the state of public education writ large. 
   
   Our public school system is foundational for free expression and for the rich exchange of information and ideas. School libraries are essential in supporting voluntary inquiry and have been defended as necessary places free from content restrictions and ideological control. And much like public libraries and other public institutions, the goal of public education is to serve everyone – equally and fairly. In sowing chaos across public education, the book banners and ideologues have laid bare their fear – namely, the fear of a more just, informed, and equitable populace.  

3. Book bans are a bellwether as censorship spreads within and beyond library shelves. During the 2024-2025 school year, in addition to targeting books for removal, censors have mobilized against a suite of other educational materials and events.
   
   Book fairs, book donations, and even scholarships aimed at supporting public education have been challenged. One of the most ironic examples is Lynchburg City Schools’ recall of “Free Speech Handbook: A Practical Framework For Understanding Our Free Speech Protections,” in August. After copies of the book were donated to elementary school students by the Virginia Education Foundation, school leaders requested families return them for containing alleged “adult satire.”
   
   Textbooks and curricula are also being challenged for many of the same topics that have been targeted for banning. In Colorado, despite a teachers’ committee’s recommendation in Mesa County Valley District to include “The Colorado Story” as part of their history curriculum, the school board vetoed the decision, citing concerns about mentions of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as negative portrayals of historical figures such as Christopher Columbus. In Florida, a biology textbook was formally challenged by multiple residents due to concerns over sections on climate change, evolution, COVID-19, and masking. 
   
   These efforts to reject educational materials are illustrative of what ideological censors want to actually destroy: educational climates that allow access to critical historical narratives, the frontiers of contemporary science, and a diverse set of ideas that encourage students to learn to think critically. As PEN America has cautioned previously, the result of these efforts to police public education will inevitably narrow open inquiry and what young people learn about the world, creating a “recipe for lowest-common-denominator curricula” which puts “the avoidance of controversy ahead of the imperative of a broad and challenging education.” 

Conclusion

“Everyday Banning” is a particularly apt phrase in the fourth year of the school book ban crisis. The climate of bans is no longer new, but something that families, educators, and all of us have become conditioned to expect as part of the U.S. education system. Book challenges and bracing for parental criticism has become as routine as preparing a syllabus or checking books in and out of the library. While most acute in a state like Florida, state laws, local policy shifts, federal policy changes, and continued attacks from conservative groups have placed extreme pressure on school district leaders to err on the side of censorship. In many parts of the country, librarians, educators, and administrators now expect lists of challenges to “objectionable” titles as an inevitability. These titles, falsely deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate,” far too often target marginalized groups and groups historically under-represented in public school library collections. Eroding students’ right to receive information about their world, their histories and identities, and their own bodies, will inevitably allow a culture of censorship to fester, impoverishing students’ educational opportunities.

It is well known that censorship can be a slippery slope and that banning “just one book” will never appease coordinated efforts to remove certain topics, ideas, and identities from public schools. As Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond warned us in their book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, those making demands will always want more. Today’s ideological censors feed not on the number of books banned, but on the ideas and people contained within these books’ pages. Banning books with trans protagonists like Call Me Max by Kyle Lukoff will never be enough, because there will always be trans stories and students. Likewise, banning Dear Martin by Nic Stone will never satisfy book banners because there will be more stories about the experiences of Black people in the U.S. and of the impact of racism on the lives of young people. It’s not about the censorship of any one book – it’s about total control of the story.

“My job is to bear witness to the reality of their lives.” Jason Reynolds, award winning author of books for children and young adults said this when talking on the Daily Show in 2024. He continued speaking directly to students, “Your life, as it exists today, is a life that matters enough to be written about.” That is the extraordinary job of the literature being banned today. Stories that reflect the lives, voices and imaginations of young people are being taken from them at the very moment when they are learning to assert their right to access information, their right to speech, and their right to explore the world. 

But there is reason to hope as local and state organizing and awareness-raising put pressure on campaigns to ban books and uplift the need to protect and defend the freedom to read. 

We owe it to them, our communities, and ourselves to fight censorship wherever and whenever we see it. This can be done by messaging your state and Congressional representatives in support for the right to read, urging elected leaders to pass legislation that protects books, schools, libraries, and librarians, speaking out on October 11 for Let Freedom Read Day – and then continuing to speak out, or reaching out to a broad coalition of authors, students, and advocacy organizations to see how you can help us fight the good fight.

“Never before” only turns into “no more” if we make the constant, consistent choice to fight for our democracy and the bedrock institutions within it – public schools, public libraries, and more – that uphold free expression principles, including the freedom to read and exchange books, stories, ideas, histories, and information. 

Acknowledgements

This report was written by the Freedom to Read Program experts Sabrina Baêta, senior program manager; Tasslyn Magnusson, PhD, senior advisor; Madison Markham, program coordinator; and Yuliana Tamayo Latorre, program assistant. The report was reviewed and edited by Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director, and Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director, U.S. Free Expression Programs. 

This report is informed by our Indexes of School Book Bans which is not possible without support from several PEN America colleagues and external consultants. Critical support for data collection and analysis was provided by consultant Sanobar Chagani and PEN America’s Daniel Cruz. Support for legislative analysis was provided by Laura Benitez, state policy manager.

Geraldine Baum, chief communications officer, oversaw production of the report and Suzanne Trimel and Lisa Tolin supported its release. We thank the entire Communications team at PEN America for their support of this work.  

PEN America is grateful for support from the Endeavor Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Long Ridge Foundation, which made this report possible. We also thank key partners in this work, including the Florida Freedom to Read Project, the Texas Freedom to Read Project, Annie’s Foundation, and Let Utah Read; as well as the contributions of the Censorship News Reports from Kelly Jensen at Book Riot.

Finally, we extend our gratitude to the many authors, teachers, librarians, parents, students, and citizens who are fighting book bans, speaking out in their communities, and raising attention to these issues. We are proud to stand with you in defending the freedom to read.