Public schools banned a record 12,000 books this year. Most were in Texas and Florida

Public schools banned nearly 12,000 books during the 2025-2026 school year, according to a new report released from PEN America, a group dedicated to freedom of expression for writers. That represents the highest number of bans in a single year since PEN started tracking them in 2021.

The 11,982 bans represented over 7,000 unique books — also a record number of titles prohibited in one year. Over 4,500 of the titles this year were brand new to PEN’s ban list, also a record for number of new titles added in a single year.

Two states were responsible for almost all of the nearly 12,000 bans: Schools in Texas banned 8,193 of them, while Florida accounted for 3,212. As noted by PEN, Texas’s new place atop the list — Florida had previously led the list of bans for three straight years — comes after the passage of Senate Bill 13, a law that banned broad categories of books in the state, including anything that contains “harmful material” or anything that is “pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable.” The law, passed under the guise of parental rights, went into effect in September 2025.

As has been true in the past, the majority of banned books deal with issues such as race and racism, LGBTQ+ people and identity, people of color, and sexuality.

Aside from the pressure exerted by political organizations and right-wing dogpiles, the rise of artificial intelligence in the book reporting process also played a role in this school year’s record number of bans. Some districts have used AI to determine which books to ban and have ended up banning them based on the recommendations of chatbots. However, these AI chatbots often recommend bans not based on content, but simply because other districts have banned them, per PEN.

The result of AI entering the book-banning process has been “wholesale overhauls of school libraries and curricula in some places,” per a report in K-12 Dive, an education-focused news outlet. “Efforts that initially targeted certain LGBTQ+ and race-related content, especially when geared toward younger children, have now expanded beyond those materials.”

The 2025-2026 school year also saw a rise in the ban of manga, which are often banned through the process of “context stripping,” or presenting a single panel out of context from the rest of the book.

Book bans have become a popular political tool of the American far-right, despite their unpopularity among the general public. Even in districts where books aren’t banned, some parental rights organizations have been able to get away with “soft censorship,” a practice that can include slapping warning labels on books or requiring parental permission in order to check a book out.

Some librarians who resist book bans have found themselves without a job. Earlier this year, in Tennessee, the Rutherford County Library Board fired its library system director, Luanne James, after she refused to move more than 190 books accused of spreading “gender confusion” out of the children’s section. James filed a First Amendment lawsuit in September.

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