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Thousands of books have been banned from schools over the last year, according to a new report, and just three red states account for the vast majority of the bans.
Schools across the country banned 6,870 books between July 2024 and June 2025, says the report from PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free expression. The 2023-24 academic year saw a 200% increase in school book bans, bringing the total instances of book bans since 2021 to nearly 23,000.
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“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country,” Kasey Meehan, the director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a press release. “A disturbing ‘everyday banning’ and normalization of censorship has worsened and spread over the last four years. The result is unprecedented.”
PEN America found that 3,752 unique titles have been banned in 87 different school districts across the country. The books the group identified as banned include those that have been prohibited entirely and those that have been removed during a review period, as well as those that have been restricted — for example, if they can only be accessed with parental permission or if they’ve been restricted to students in certain grades.
Florida, which has been at the forefront of the effort to remove books from school libraries, led the nation in book bans, with 2,304 instances recorded last school year. Texas came in second place with 1,781 removals, followed by Tennessee, which had 1,622 bans.
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Like in years past, many of the banned books have LGBTQ+ themes, including “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” by Malinda Lo, which is about a teenage girl discovering her sexuality. The award-winning novel was one of the top five most-banned books last year. The most banned book last school year was “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess, a satirical novel about a dystopian future.
Conservative groups have baselessly claimed many of the affected works contain “sexually explicit” material, therefore making them inappropriate for students. It’s all a part of right-wing culture warriors’ efforts to dismantle and remake the nation’s public schools into a place where far-right ideology can thrive.
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Since the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty, which was founded in Florida, have spearheaded a movement to install conservative school board members, censor teachers and remove books that contain LGBTQ+ or racial justice themes.
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