The 2024–25 academic year was the fourth in a row to be impacted by the “contemporary campaign to ban books” that has swept the U.S., according to a recent report from PEN America on the subject.
In total, book bans happened in 23 states, impacting 87 public school districts. There were 6,870 instances of book bans with 3,752 unique titles affected. Disparities in the occurrence of school book bans varied greatly by state between July 2024 and June 2025, the report found. California was among 28 states where no bans occurred, while Florida saw 2,304 books banned across 33 districts.
For this report, PEN America defined school book bans as “any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.”
The report notes that the books available on campuses, in a school or classroom library or as part of curriculum, were chosen by educators and librarians. This year, three kinds of bans were reported on: books that were banned, banned pending investigation and banned by restriction (meaning grade- or school-level restrictions were put in place on titles or books will require parental permissions to access).
“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country,” the report states. “Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.”
Findings
The report identifies key trends such as how the federal government has used rhetoric from state and local efforts around book censorship to support initiatives to “restrict education” and how having LGBTQ+ identities in books is consistently being conflated as including “sexually explicit” material. Books being removed with LGBTQ+ characters raises concerns about the erasure of LGBTQ+ representation.
“One trend has remained constant throughout these four years: Many of these book bans are not due to decisions made in reconsideration policies and processes. Nor are they the direct result of legislation,” according to the report. “For the 2024–25 school year, vast numbers of the books removed from shelves — pending investigation and permanently banned — came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators and educators.”
Although state-mandated bans are hard to quantify, the report estimates that their impact on students is significant. The report also includes information on ongoing advocacy against book censorship “in defense of the freedom to read.”
In 2024–25, “Wicked” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” were among nine of the most banned books by district. The top three books were “A Clockwork Orange,” “Breathless,” and “Sold.”
“Some types of books are targeted for removal because of their content; but the climate of censorship that has spread in schools has impacted a wide array of titles written for all sorts of audiences,” the report states. “Access to literature prepares our youth to confront the real world, offering a window into experiences otherwise unknown to them. However, diverse ideas and stories featuring protagonists from historically marginalized identities are often the first topics targeted by censors.”
Though instances of book bans were fewer than they were in 2023–24 (10,046 compared to 6,870 in 2024–25), they are still far more common than they were in previous years (2,532 in 2021–22 and 3,362 in 2022–23).
