Take, for example, Warren County Public Library in New Jersey. Despite rampant pushback from the community, the library board of trustees voted recently to post BookLooks as a “review resource” in four of its libraries. It is being put alongside actual legitimate review sources for patrons to have access to while in the library or perusing the library resources online.
“What’s the big deal?” asks one of the county commissioners about the controversy surrounding this decision. The big deal is that it is a slap in the face to all of the professional library workers in Warren County, and it is offensive and belittling to every patron of the county library. This isn’t a source of information. It’s a blatant source of mis- and dis- information peddled by a right-wing group. It is a creeping of conspiracy into the work of libraries to provide accurate information.
Again: the community did not want this. The county decided it knew better and ignored that feedback and ignored the expertise of their trained professionals in the library. This is authoritarianism. It is paternalism. Is is bowing to a political regime.
It won’t be “just” BookLooks. It’ll be the shoving of other ramshackle “review” systems like RatedBooks and the inclusion of right-wing propaganda in library collections because “what’s the harm of a book from Brave Books?” and so on and so forth.
BookmarkED/OnShelf and Other Technology to “Solve the Problem of Inappropriate Books”
Speaking of “solutions” to a manufactured problem, remember BookmarkED/OnShelf, the technology meant to help Texas school librarians navigate book bans in their libraries? The one that was created by an educational technologist who showed up to Texas legislature in order to advocate for book banning so he could get his program rammed into schools and make a pretty penny off the backs of library workers and public school students? The one that will show schools it’s cheaper to invest in a piece of proprietary technology that won’t disclose its sources of information than it is a real, live librarian who knows how to do the work?
It’s already made its way into many more schools in Texas in the 2024-2025 school year. This is despite how much information is out there about the actual motivations and goals of the program.
BookmarkED/OnShelf has been creeping outside of Texas, though, too, and it’s going to continue to creep its way into schools nationwide. Because why bother Googling what this program actually is and who is behind it? Those buying into it are buying into propaganda and are far less interested in supporting their staff in their professional growth or skills. Scan the book into this database, see if it’s been banned somewhere based on data that’s been scraped and collected via AI from somewhere that the company won’t disclose (there is only one source of public information of nearly all the book bans nationwide and it’s not them, so what are the chances they’re simply stealing scraping that work as their own?), then tell the kid sorry, because Itty Bitty Kitty-Corn was banned in Katy Independent School District because it turned on a school board member was “too sexually suggestive,” they cannot borrow it. Anyone can do that…and thus, the library doesn’t need to have a trained librarian and, well, budgets are tight so let’s eliminate them and use this instead.
BookmarkED/OnShelf isn’t the only tool like this. In fact, the state of Florida has allocated a significant amount of money to a similar tool for its school libraries. Scroll down to page 334 of the proposed budget for 2025-2026 in the state and find the following:
The request here is for nearly four million dollars to invest in a “tool” to help parents navigate book bans. That tool comes from Trinity Education Group and is called the Standards & Materials Navigator. This is a statewide spend to seek out banned books and making removal of books in school districts easier, quicker, and less transparent.
Here is something crucial to understand about this: by purchasing a third-party technology solution, it will become much harder—if not downright impossible—for people to access public information about the books being challenged, banned, and removed from schools across Florida. The school will not hold this information; it will be held on the servers of the private firm, meaning that it is not subject to public records requests.
This will result in books being banned and removed without the public having any idea because getting information about such bans will no longer be discoverable. You can and should read more from the Florida Freedom to Read Project on this particular “solution” being purchased by taxpayers for a problem manufactured by a small subset of a political party. For all of the demands of transparency by that contingent, they sure love finding ways to avoid transparency.
Expect more of these solutions to be bought and paid for with your tax money. Expect to see fewer professionals who know how to do their job and, in their place, see tech bros who don’t actually give a shit about helping children navigate the world or build literacy skills line their pockets with our dollars.
Wholesale Bans of Books with Specific Themes or Topics, Targeting Anything Outside the Gender Binary
In 2024, at least three different library systems—two public school and one public—banned entire swaths of books based on fitting a theme they deemed “inappropriate” or too “sexual?” These weren’t the only ones, of course, but they did at least receive a smidgen of attention by the media.
Katy Independent School District (TX) voted at the end of August to ban books from the district that adopt, support, or promote “gender fluidity.” What does that mean, exactly? That question is the precise point. We know that there are people who identify as gender fluid—not necessarily adhering to a single gender identity and/or moving between gender identities—but this district’s loosely defined terminology here means that any book the board could define as conveying “gender fluid” ideas will be removed from the district.
What Katy ISD’s policy also does is ban these books from district vendors AND from book fair companies that host events in the district. Read that again. Katy ISD will no longer be buying books from vendors who have books about gender fluidity and will no longer allow book fairs where those books may be made available. Despite the claim that “kids can buy the books” and thus “they’re not banned,” this flies right in the face of the years-long chorus from the book banners.
And it’s exactly what played out in South Carolina this year, too.
Greenville County Public Library this year created several new policies around “trans” books for kids. First, books by or about trans ideas, identities, or themes were moved into a “parenting” section though they were written for an audience of those under the age of 12. Then, just months later, the public library board elected to restrict these books from anyone under the age of 18. The library would move any and all “trans” books written for teens from their YA section and relocate them to the adult section. To access them, anyone under 18 needs explicit permission.
Blanket censorship and intricate policy-making wasn’t limited to the public library in Greenville, though. The Greenville County Public Schools also banned several themes from their district, which—exactly as it is laid out in Katy’s policy—had a direct and immediate impact on the book fairs that could be hosted at the school. The district claimed these thematic issues were a result of new state laws, which is only partially true; the district’s eagerness to ban happened well in advance of the state’s draconian new laws that give them the power to ban titles statewide.
Greenville County Public Schools met this fall and listed a whole host of new guidelines that book fairs have to follow in order to be allowed in the district. Book fairs not only offer access to kids who may never actually be able to get to a bookstore or who may never have owned a book because it was unaffordable (book fair titles are frequently less pricey than their store counterparts) but they help the school libraries get a little money, too. Now in order to have a book fair at Greenville County Schools, though, vendors have to acknowledge they know both the state laws and school policies on books that are and are not allowed (i.e., no books with content that is not “age and developmentally appropriate,” a loose guideline from the state that can mean whatever the district wants it to be) and every student needs to have a signed permission form to even view the titles at the book fair…and that’s after the district and every parent gets the list of books available at the book fair in advance.
That’s hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.
Not to be outdone, though, Lamar Independent School District (TX) banned all books about “gender fluidity” from their district just two weeks ago.
We’re going to keep seeing this. We’re going to keep seeing actual identities reduced to an idea that can be interpreted in any way that most benefit those in authority. In ways they continue to minimize and demean human beings who don’t neatly fit into One Category or The Other.
More Attempts to Pass Voucher Schemes
Over the last few years, I’ve written extensively about the destruction of public education via state-initiated voucher schemes that steal taxpayer money and give it to those already wealthy enough to send their students to private schools. We saw the impact as at least one school in Iowa has had to already close, and vouchers caused a complete budget meltdown in Arizona.
One holdout—likely surprising to many folks—is Texas. Texas, a leader in book banning and educational targeting because of the right-wing politicians who have gerrymandered and voter suppressed their way to power—should be a natural shoe-in for vouchers. But the reality is, in Texas and beyond, people like their public schools. Public schools are not just institutions of democracy; they’re centers where neighbors see and interact with one another and come together to celebrate victories and mourn tremendous loss.
Think of Texas’s Friday Night Lights, the longtime trend of Homecoming mums, and the utter pride both big and small towns have in their public schools. It is that pride which helped the voucher scheme presented before the legislature did not pass, and it is the reality that Texans in rural communities (the *most* red areas of the state) understood that vouchers would make accessing education for their children impossible because private institutions—even the fly by night ones popping up amid the voucher frenzy—are primarily in suburban or urban areas.
However, in 2025, we might see this change in Texas. It wouldn’t be the least surprising to see the state implement vouchers that will decimate the public schools and that’s thanks to new laws passed through the state education department, controlled by influences that are hellbent on passing such vouchers.
Texas’s education board approved a new curriculum last week that infuses history lessons with material from the Bible. While the headlines linger on the second part and that is what has captured much of the public attention and outrage, the reality of this new curriculum is actually a lot darker. The Bible-infused curriculum is not mandatory, but any public school that chooses to implement it will receive a cash reward of $40 per student. That’s huge money in public schools, particularly those in rural areas.
It’s also extremely convenient leverage for the voucher program: if you don’t like your public school teaching Christian-infused curriculum, then you should support a voucher program which allows you to send your kid to any school in the state. If you’re a school and worried about how cash-strapped you’d be because of the voucher program, then you have a solution in implementing this curriculum that the state will pay you to implement.
Problem, meet solution.
Perhaps it is worth addressing here, too, that this new curriculum is not only problematic as hell for its Christian basis—separation of church and state doesn’t actually matter to politicians who see the issue not as keeping the church out of the state but instead, keeping the state out of the church—but it further lines the pockets of right-wing politicians. Many of the lessons that the Texas State Education Department passed come from Mike Huckabee’s media company.
Even Less Media Coverage of Book Censorship
It has been independent media companies carrying the weight of covering not only the vast majority of book censorship news but also the bigger context behind why all of this matters—see that phenomenal reporting from The 74 about Huckabee’s connection to the Texas curriculum. The reason why so few mainstream media outlets cover book censorship have been laid out time and time again here and elsewhere, so no need to rehash it.
That said, more media will be complying in advance of the new administration, hoping not to have their names added to watch or hit lists. That’s what happens in authoritarianism, and it’s what will happen under a regime that has lambasted the media for almost a decade now. Add to that the administration’s pushing of the narrative that the media perpetuates mis- and dis- information—and the upcoming policies that will make educating people about how to navigate media in an era of bad information paraded as truth and implemented as law punishable as a crime—and the reality that many of the biggest media outlets are owned by billionaires who want to stay on the administration’s good side…most stories won’t actually get told.
Not only is it too risky, the reality is that these stories don’t generate clicks. If they don’t generate clicks, they don’t generate traffic and thus, don’t generate advertising revenue, and thus, aren’t worth the time a reporter or writer puts into shining light on the truth.
Democracy dies in darkness, so says the Washington Post. But the truth is, democracy dies because it’s either behind a paywall and because the media has elected to be complicit.
We will see continued strong reporting from independent journalists and writers. We will see the periodic piece from mainstream media do tremendous work to showcase what’s actually happening.
But if you think finding or hearing about book censorship is tough now, it’s only going to get a lot worse and quickly.
Citizen activists, librarians and educators, independent journalists, and others who have been swimming in this muck since 2020 will become even more crucial to keeping democracy afloat. They will be more crucial in talking about the things not being covered elsewhere and they will, unfortunately, be responsible for continuing to highlight that new policies, new technology, and new tools are not here to help. They’re here to continue to obfuscate the truth and make information that the public has the right to know as hidden and private as possible.
Book Censorship News: December 6, 2024
- 48 books must be removed by the start of the new year in all Knox County, Tennessee, schools.
- The Texas State Board of Education wants to take over creating ratings for books across the state public schools. This isn’t actually a new thing, as the Texas Education Agency has come up a number of times related to, well, book bans, beginning in 2021.
- A right-wing politician in Idaho saw a flier for an LGBTQ+ youth group at the Nampa Public Library and all hell broke loose as he inflicted his cult on the library and group over it. Over a flier, y’all. The group was not even meeting at the library and it had no affiliation with the library.
- While we’re in Nampa, Idaho, the school district just updated their library policies to make accommodations for the state’s new hateful laws. The thing standing out in this to me is that the principal will create a committee for review (normal), but the principal will be able to make the final decision.
- Campbell County Public Library (WY) might need to stop using “liberal” professional review sources for collection development because the right-wing board doesn’t like facts.
- These were the 21 books challenged in Christian County Public Library (MO). The group behind the challenges is especially hateful toward the library as a whole, which has been covered here several times. Reviews of the challenged books resulted in nearly all of them being kept as-is. Two were relocated and two were removed. Whether or not the decisions were quiet censorship is hard to tell.
- Here’s a look at the manga now banned in many Tennessee school districts.
- The book banning bigots on the Huntington Beach, California, City Council, plan to not enforce the forthcoming state law that bans book bans. Why? “Because they can.” If this is how city council logic plays, then they shouldn’t get the benefits provided by being incorporated into the state.
- The conservative group America First Legal took in $80K from a fundraiser to fight its federal book ban case—the one involving Llano County Public Library—and wouldn’t you know…the county hasn’t seen any of that money.
- What’s happening in Maryland amid book banning. Recall the state passed an anti-book ban bill, but there are plenty of places where that doesn’t matter.
- You’ll notice a theme this week—thanks to the holiday last week and the next series of holidays in the coming weeks. Here’s what’s happening in New Jersey libraries as their anti-book ban bill awaits the governor’s signature.
- Polk County Schools in Florida have banned 30 titles from the district. That’s in total so far.
- The chief librarian at Goshen Library (IN) has resigned, citing harassment. Here’s just one story from 2024 of how the library has been targeted by the folks who couldn’t define woke if it was written on their eyelids.
- (Paywalled) The Fairhope Public Library (AL) board of trustees wants to give themselves more power to select the books in the library. That’s not their job, of course, nor is it their expertise. Way to support their own professionals, to boot. Here’s an unpaywalled story about how Moms For Liberty and the team from Clean Up Alabama are trying to take over this library.
- Also in Alabama, book banners want to ban an LGBTQ+ group from taking part in a local Christmas parade.
- “On the Defeating Communism PAC website, a statement reads, “We need every freedom-loving American to join us and stand against the anti-American Marxist agenda.” While the flyer made Wood a focal point of the election, it also endorsed three candidates for the Lexington-Richland School District Five school board: Catherine Huddle, Ken Loveless, and Jason Baynham. But why was Wood the target? In her English class, Wood assigned the book, Between the World and Me, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a nonfiction book exploring the Black experience in the United States. However, district officials instructed Wood to stop assigning the book to students, because it violates a provision that prohibits discussions on a broad range of topics related to race. ” It’s America in 2024, and teachers are targeted in school board elections for…using books that people who believe communists are running schools don’t like. This is in Lexington-Richmond Five Schools (VA).
- Pinellas Public Schools (FL) are facing a challenge to the book The Artivist because some right-wing, brainwashed-by-the-right media parents think it is “too political.”
- The School Board of Alachua County (FL) voted to keep two books in their high school libraries. The books are Lucky by Alice Sebold and Burned by Ellen Hopkins.
- This week, the State Department of Education in South Carolina made decisions on two more books. Both Crank and the HMH Introduction to Literature 8th Grade will remain on shelves in school districts statewide, but anyone under 18 who wants to access Crank will need parental/guardian permission.
- It’s expected that the New Jersey governor will sign their anti-book ban bill before the end of the year.
- An update on the legal issues in Crawford County Library system (AR).
- No appointment of a library board member was made at Prattville Public Library (AL) this week. Prattville’s been long besieged by the right, and their way of handling this particular library board seat is absolutely bananas. Some years, the city controls the library and other times, the county does.
- St. Joseph School District (MO) has finished their decision making on challenged books. They’re keeping If I Was Your Girl as is, but they are keeping All Boys Aren’t Blue with restriction—mommy or daddy need to give permission for anyone under 18 to borrow it in the school. This is still book censorship.
- “A teacher has sued New Richmond Exempted Village Board of Education after the superintendent suspended her for three days without pay for having four books in her class library with LGBTQ+ characters.” Good for her. She shouldn’t need to, but good for her. This is in Ohio.
- Oklahoma wants to make superintendents an elected position. This would be absolutely terrible.
