A new report reveals that the majority of book bans in US schools during the 2024-2025 school year occurred in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. While the total number of bans decreased slightly compared to the previous year, the figures remain significantly higher than pre-2021 levels, highlighting a concerning trend driven by concerns over content related to LGBTQ+ themes, race, and violence.
An annual report on book bans in U.S. schools finds that 80% of the nearly 7,000 books banned for the 2024-2025 school year took place in just three states. The report, called "Banned in the USA," was released Wednesday by PEN America.
The three states that have removed or attempted to remove the most books in the past year are Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texas with 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622. RELATED: These are the best states for teachers, data suggestsIn all, PEN tracked 6,870 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.Since 2021, PEN America has reported nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts. "It is increasingly a story of two countries," Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read program and an author of Wednesday’s report, said. "And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all of the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county."More than two dozen states reported 0 book bans for the 2024-2025 school year, although several of those states don’t report banning data. The PEN report doesn’t have data from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other "red" states because researchers could not find adequate documentation. Meehan adds that PEN also doesn’t know the full impact of statewide laws.The top five banned books for the school year were: Reasons often cited for banning books include LGBTQ+ themes, depictions of race and passages with violence and sexual violence. An ongoing trend that PEN finds has only intensified: Thousands of books were taken off shelves in anticipation of community, political or legal pressure rather than in response to a direct threat."This functions as a form of ‘obeying in advance,’" the report reads, "rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial."PEN’s numbers also include the Department of Defense’s removal of hundreds of books from K-12 school libraries for military families as part of an overall campaign against DEI initiatives and "un-American" thinking.Stephen King was named as the author most likely to be censored. King’s books were censored 206 times, according to PEN, with "Carrie" and "The Stand" among the 87 of his works affected.
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