Conducted and published by free speech advocacy nonprofit PEN America, America’s Censored Classrooms 2024: Refining the Art of Censorship examines the educational censorship laws that have been introduced and passed in each state from 2021 to 2024, with a focus on higher education. PEN American defines educational gag orders as “state legislation and policies that restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identity in educational settings.”
To be clear, this isn’t a report solely focused on library book removals and reviews, something that PEN America has also followed closely. Those efforts are included in a much broader category in this case.
“Educational censorship is changing,” the report reads. “The educational gag orders of 2021 that directly prohibited teaching specific topics are largely a thing of the past. In 2024, most educational censorship bills don’t fulminate against critical race theory or the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Instead, they are more likely to attach themselves to a worthy goal, like promoting 'institutional neutrality' or 'viewpoint diversity,' combating antisemitism, or treating all students equally.”
According to the PEN America report, Texas proposed 15 educational gag orders from 2021 to 2024. House Bill 3979 and Senate Bill 3, both from 2021, are now laws that fit what PEN America says are educational gag orders.
HB 3979 is the successful effort by the more conservative lawmakers in the House to keep critical race theory from being taught in public schools by restricting how teachers discuss controversial topics including race and how race relations have shaped history and current society.
Educational gag orders strike at the heart of the mission of any university. In our new report, America's Censored Classrooms, we tracked eight new educational gag orders at the state level in the 2024 legislative session -- and 47 since 2021. https://t.co/Ygmqmox9Bj pic.twitter.com/coy9SaXBxy
— PEN America (@PENamerica) October 17, 2024
Texas isn’t the leader when it comes to proposing educational gag orders, however, but it’s close. Oklahoma, a state every bit as dominated politically by the Republican Party as Texas has long been, nearly doubled the Lone Star State with 30 proposed educational gag orders, as defined by PEN America. South Carolina tied Texas for second with 16, and Indiana had 14.
Of the 15 educational gag orders proposed in Texas, six of them targeted higher education, including Senate Bill 17, which forced public universities to shutter diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programs. Again, Oklahoma had more of these with 12, and Mississippi and Tennessee surpassed Texas with nine and seven, respectively.
In the report, PEN America states that in 2024 “policymakers largely abandoned straightforward calls for censorship, opting instead to disguise their intentions through euphemism and misdirection.” Frank Strong, an Austin-area teacher and author of the school district watchdog Substack Anger & Clarity, agrees that “misdirection” is in play when it comes to how the state government has censored teachers and classrooms, but he doesn’t think it's all that new.
“There has always been a certain amount of deception and misdirection behind book bans and educational gag orders in Texas schools,” he said. “For example, it was always obviously false that HB 900 [the READER Act] is just targeting sexual content. We can see that the books affected by the law are disproportionately about the experiences of certain groups of people, and we’ve seen people pushing the law saying that is exactly their intent.”
Strong also explains that once a policy is in place, Texas school districts have found ways to use the gray areas in those new rules to extend the reach of its restrictions.
“And we are definitely seeing censorship in Texas occurring in ways that can be hard to track,” he says. “We see some districts using ‘weeding,' the regular process by which librarians remove old or outdated books, to remove controversial books. And other districts are removing books, sometimes in large numbers, through informal or internal reviews that don’t follow the regular, formal book complaint process.”
PEN America’s report ends on a somewhat encouraging note, given the subject matter.
“Fortunately, several positive trends first identified in 2023 continued to gain steam in 2024,” the report reads. “Legal resistance to gag orders has scored a number of major wins, dealing significant setbacks to would-be censors.”
Such may be the case around the country, but Texas, as evidenced in the report, isn’t like most other states, where the classrooms aren’t so easily viewed as social and political battlefields.
“I also think a lot of Texas politicians are still comfortable saying they think that certain ideas flat-out don’t belong in schools and public libraries,” Strong says. “... So in that sense, some of what PEN America is describing hasn’t reached Texas yet, even though book-banning candidates haven’t fared well overall in Texas school board elections.”
