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The Scarlet Letter, A Farewell to Arms, A Separate Peace...all required reading in my TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM in the 90s. I could live another 500 years and I would still fail to be bewildered by how it has come to this.

Trevor Noah's book, Born A Crime, is on here from New Braunfels. Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park is on here from Brazosport. Pilot Point pulled The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This spreadsheet is insane.

It’s generally not about grievances over specific books. Most of these titles were out caught up due to overly broad restrictions introduced in response to new laws. Here’s a doc one district sent us. You can see the main reason for removal is “written for adult audience.”

Fair, but part of the audience for this is Texas lawmakers. I was choosing books I thought would get their attention.

That's bad, too! And part of our argument against Senate Bill 13 was that it would lead to more removals of Huck Finn. franklinstrong.substack.com/p/a-new-bill...

No, these are removals from the library, specifically as a result of Senate Bill 12, Senate Bill 13, or the district's local selection policy. Most districts that remove books from the library also require their removal from classrooms, but that's harder to document.

While volunteers helped @txfreedomread.bsky.social track book removals from Tx schools after SB12 & SB13 were passed last year, I made a spreadsheet of the classic & acclaimed books that were banned from individual districts in 2025-2026. You won't believe it. open.substack.com/pub/franklin...

While volunteers helped @txfreedomread.bsky.social track book removals from Tx schools after SB12 & SB13 were passed last year, I made a spreadsheet of the classic & acclaimed books that were banned from individual districts in 2025-2026. You won't believe it. open.substack.com/pub/franklin...

She didn’t say, but I mentioned Elizabeth Acevedo and Jesmyn Ward in my comments, so I’m guessing The Poet X and/or Salvage the Bones.

As Goes Texas: The Roadmap for Dismantling Public Education for All. Texas's Bible-infused required reading lists for public school students are just the start. Expect other states to follow, as this is coming from the federal government. buttondown.com/wellsourced/...

please read it, especially if you like the idea of science of reading and/or state or company mandated book lists

Some fear America is experiencing a literacy crisis, but business has been so good at Talking Animals Books in Grapevine that they opened a second location.

"Our reading curriculum specialist told me and the other middle school librarian that we needed to create a “Classics/AP literature” section in our libraries because our district wasn’t producing any National Merit Scholars, and it’s because they weren’t reading critically. So we did...." 1/2

But Amanda told me that her student library aides, who witnessed everything that happened this year, were spurred to action by the nonsense grownups pulled to the detriment of their education.

Of course students bore the consequences, in the form of lost educational opportunities. Amanda told me her library circulation numbers this year were the lowest of her career.

Then, when what was happening became public, she was accused—often by the same people who pressured the district into removing books—of using “malicious compliance” to make the district or lawmakers look bad.

All year long, Amanda was forced to act in ways that went against her professional judgement, that she said went against everything she’d ever been taught in library school and professional development.

The books that were removed as “inappropriate content” were sent to the trash.

And the waste! The books that were removed from middle schools and sent to the high schools were part of a project Amanda initiated seven years ago specifically to provide more rigorous, higher-level reading options for advanced readers in her school.