Just 3 states are responsible for 80% of known school book bans

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FILE - Aisles of bookshelves at Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (Photo by: Plexi Images/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

An annual report on book bans in U.S. schools finds that 80% of the nearly 7,000 books banned for the 2024-2025 school year took place in just three states.

The report, called "Banned in the USA," was released Wednesday by PEN America.

Which states ban the most books?

Local perspective:

The three states that have removed or attempted to remove the most books in the past year are Florida, Texas and Tennessee.

By the numbers:

Florida was the No. 1 state for book bans, with 2,304 instances of bans, followed by Texas with 1,781 bans and Tennessee with 1,622.

In all, PEN tracked 6,870 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.

Since 2021, PEN America has reported nearly 23,000 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.

What they're saying:

"It is increasingly a story of two countries," Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read program and an author of Wednesday’s report, said. "And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all of the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county."

The other side:

More than two dozen states reported 0 book bans for the 2024-2025 school year, although several of those states don’t report banning data.

What's missing:

The PEN report doesn’t have data from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other "red" states because researchers could not find adequate documentation. Meehan adds that PEN also doesn’t know the full impact of statewide laws.

Top 5 banned books

The top five banned books for the school year were:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess with 23 bans
Sold by Patricia McCormick with 20 bans
Breathless by Jennifer Niven with 20 bans
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo with 19 bans
A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas with 18 bans

Why are books being banned?

Big picture view:

Reasons often cited for banning books include LGBTQ+ themes, depictions of race and passages with violence and sexual violence. An ongoing trend that PEN finds has only intensified: Thousands of books were taken off shelves in anticipation of community, political or legal pressure rather than in response to a direct threat.

"This functions as a form of ‘obeying in advance,’" the report reads, "rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial."

PEN’s numbers also include the Department of Defense’s removal of hundreds of books from K-12 school libraries for military families as part of an overall campaign against DEI initiatives and "un-American" thinking.