“While parents and guardians ought to be partners with educators in their children’s education, and need channels for communicating with school administrators, teachers, and librarians, particularly concerning the education of their own children, public schools are by design supposed to rely on the expertise, ethics, and discretion of educational professionals to make decisions,” PEN America said in the report. PEN America, and other Moms for Liberty critics, accuse the groups of using the term “parents’ rights” to undermine and intimidate education professionals and other parents. The group also added it is advocating for limited government roles and fighting school indoctrination. Moms for Liberty said it is committed to “unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” These groups are not only targeting books in schools, but they are branching out into public libraries, and are also campaigning to take on leadership roles in school districts. The majority of the bans come from parent-driven efforts with groups like Moms for Liberty, a Brevard County-based group that has since gone national, with chapters in almost every state. Twenty-two percent of the books banned had sexual content. Forty percent had characters of color as primary or prominent secondary characters, with 21% of the titles dealing with issues of race and racism. Of the books banned, 41% had LGBTQ themes, protagonists or prominent secondary characters. PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, and 1,648 unique book titles, between July 2021 and June 2022.

PEN America, an international group that advocates for literacy freedom, released its report on the banned book movement Monday, as the annual Banned Books Week got underway. Some of those efforts got their start here in Central Florida. In the last year, there have been more than 2,500 instances of books being pulled from shelves in schools across America as conservative groups coordinate efforts to target books for numerous reasons, typically related to race or gender themes. 9 UPDATE: A revised list of books banned or under review is now available HERE.

I am jazz banned book