Nearly Twelve Thousand School Book Bans, Zero Winners

Schools in the United States banned books eleven thousand nine hundred eighty-two times in a single school year, according to PEN America. The free-speech organization's "A Spotlight on School Book Bans" study, released October 6, calls that figure the largest it has recorded since tracking began in the 2021-22 school year. The previous high was ten thousand forty-six bans in 2023-24; the year before that saw six thousand eight hundred seventy. School book bans have nearly quadrupled in five years.

The raw total understates what happened. PEN America found the bans covered seven thousand three hundred seventy unique titles, touching the work of more than four thousand authors, illustrators, and translators. More than four thousand five hundred of those titles had never appeared in the group's ban index before, the biggest one-year influx on record. The removals spread across one hundred fourteen school districts, also a record. Fifty-eight percent of the bans hit young adult fiction, and nearly nine in ten of the removed books were fiction of some kind. The targets were not moldy reference books. They were the titles teenagers pick up on their own.

Two states, one playbook

Almost the entire school book bans count came from two states. Texas produced roughly three-quarters of all school book bans, according to PEN America, with Florida adding thousands more. No other state registered more than a trickle: California logged two bans, according to EdSource. The geography makes the mechanism obvious. Texas passed a sweeping law last year letting schools ban books that supporters of the measure deemed profane or indecent, and Texas school boards went to work at industrial scale. Where politicians manufacture pressure to pull books, the books get pulled.

The uncomfortable question is what any of this accomplishes. Banned books turn into reading lists, which is the first problem with school book bans. The most frequently banned book in the country was Patricia McCormick's young adult novel Sold, an award-winning story about a Nepalese teenager sold into sexual slavery that teachers had assigned for years. John Green's Looking for Alaska, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre all drew bans, the last one for the first time in the report's history. A censorship movement that blacklists Jane Eyre looks less like a defense of children and more like a confession that the censors have run out of plausible targets.

AI is now picking the books

The report's strangest finding is that school administrators have started letting artificial intelligence decide what to remove. In several cases, PEN America found that AI tools flagged a book for banning for the simple reason that another district had already banned it. The software amplified everyone else's censorship in a loop while librarians, the people trained to know the shelves, were cut out of the process. The Hill reported that Texas officials relied on AI-generated recommendation lists to carry out removals at record speed.

The loop runs on bans, not books. Nobody taught the model literary judgment; it learned which titles were already gone and recommended making more of them gone. EdSource noted that many titles were pulled preemptively, before a single complaint was filed, a pattern PEN America describes as "obeying in advance." Schools now remove books nobody asked them to remove, on the advice of software that cannot tell a classic from a cookbook. That is the administrative version of grading essays by counting the commas.

What the bans actually target

PEN America is direct about the pattern: five years of school book bans have overwhelmingly targeted books about race and racism, LGBTQ+ people and characters, people and characters of color, and sex. Manga and graphic novels drew particular hostility. Works by creators such as Hajime Isayama, Rumiko Takahashi, Atsushi Ohkubo, and Yusei Matsui landed on ban lists after challengers lifted panels out of context and labeled illustrated depictions of violence or identity as inappropriate. The visual storytelling that pulls reluctant readers into books — the same energy behind this fall's stacked anime season — is precisely what the banners distrust.

Stephen King topped the individual-author list, with PEN America reporting that dozens of his works were banned nationwide, followed by Ellen Hopkins and Sarah J. Maas. Several authors, including King and Hopkins, have had entire catalogs pulled rather than single titles. King responded to the report by saying that if a book sits in a high school library, some bored teenager might pick it up and discover how good stories can be. Kasey Meehan, who directs PEN America's Freedom to Read program, said that stripping the young adult titles teenagers love most is an especially damaging move while reading among young people is already in broad decline. And the Florida numbers suggest the political pressure behind the bans is not fading.

The record school book bans total should embarrass the people who built it. School book bans at this scale do not produce better-read students; they teach teenagers that adults are afraid of stories, and teenagers have a reliable habit of investigating whatever adults fear. The AI-assisted lists, the two-state chokehold on the numbers, the preemptive purges — none of it has made a banned book unreadable. It has made the school library the most interesting room in the building.