Record school book bans sweep US classrooms this fall

A record wave of school book bans swept through US public schools last year, with PEN America counting 11,982 removals during the 2025-26 school year, the highest single-year total since the free-expression organization began tracking them in 2021. The tally covers more than seventy-three hundred unique titles and the work of more than four thousand authors, illustrators, and translators. Over forty-five hundred of those titles had never appeared on the group's index before, the largest single-year addition on record. A total of one hundred fourteen school districts removed books, also a single-year high.

Texas and Florida drove the surge, with AI screening books

Nearly all of the school book bans came from two states. Roughly eighty-one hundred removals happened in Texas and about thirty-two hundred in Florida, where state officials have passed restrictive laws and pressed districts to pull titles, according to the report. In Texas, a state law passed last year known as SB 13 banned a broad range of books that supporters of the measure described as profane or indecent, PEN America found. The previous school year saw under sixty-nine hundred bans nationwide, and the earlier record was just over ten thousand in 2023-24, which means removals have nearly doubled in twelve months.

The report also documents the first direct evidence that school districts are using artificial intelligence to decide which books to pull in the newest round of school book bans. Public records obtained by the Texas Freedom to Read Project show multiple schools fed book lists into AI tools for screening. In several cases, the report says, the software recommended banning a title simply because another district had already banned it, not because of anything in the book itself. The authors describe a snowball effect, where bans in one place get copied in others while librarians and local communities are cut out of the decision. A senior manager for PEN America's Freedom to Read program told reporters the group is seeing the practice show up in its data for the first time.

What students are losing access to

Young adult fiction took the heaviest hit. Books aimed at teen readers made up 58 percent of all school book bans, and fiction overall accounted for 87 percent. The most frequently banned book was Sold, a 2006 novel by journalist Patricia McCormick about a girl in Nepal sold into sexual slavery. Stephen King was the most-banned author for the second straight year, and PEN America notes that whole catalogs are now being pulled at once, including the work of King and novelist Ellen Hopkins. New additions to the index this year ranged from Charlotte Bronte's nineteenth-century classic Jane Eyre to Sui Ishida's manga series Tokyo Ghoul.

Manga and graphic novels emerged as a distinct target of the school book bans. The report says visual panels are often judged out of context, with challengers treating single images as explicit without regard for the story around them. Manga creators Atsushi Ohkubo, Hajime Isayama, Rumiko Takahashi, and Yusei Matsui rank among the most commonly banned graphic-novel authors. Across all formats, the report's analysis of thousands of bans over five years shows the same pattern: books about race and racism, LGBTQ people and characters, people of color, and sex are challenged far more often than anything else.

The American Library Association's separate count of school book bans points in the same direction. The ALA tracked more than forty-two hundred unique titles challenged last year, its second-highest total ever, with nearly fifty-seven hundred books banned outright and hundreds more restricted through measures like moving them to closed sections or requiring a parent's permission. According to the ALA, 92 percent of challenges came from organized groups, government officials, or other decision-makers, while fewer than three percent came from individual parents. The most common justifications cited false claims of obscenity, the ALA reported.

Lawmakers have started responding to the school book bans. A resolution introduced in both the House and the Senate by Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Brian Schatz cites PEN America's findings and calls for protecting students' access to diverse viewpoints, backing the work of educators and librarians, and rolling back directives that restrict reading in public schools. The resolution arrived as schools and libraries marked Banned Books Week with events drawing attention to censorship. For students, the stakes are concrete: the report argues that school libraries are where many young readers first find stories that reflect their own lives, and each removal narrows that shelf a little further.