Remote learning did a lot for education. Out of necessity, it taught students a new way to learn. It also opened their parents’ eyes to the inequities that exist within curricula and instruction across the country. Since then, they’ve gotten vocal about wanting a say in their kids’ educations—and they’re taking steps to ensure their children are receiving not only the best education possible but also what they believe aligns with their values. That includes controlling which books are available in school libraries.
“I think we can see that what’s happened in the past couple of years is that public school classrooms have become ground zero for these contemporary culture wars,” says Dr. Kristen Slungaard Mumma, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University who recently conducted research into how politics are shaping student’s access to controversial materials. The study comes at a time when school libraries have become one of the most prominent areas of focus for political groups, which she finds strange.
“We see that in moves like the anti-critical race theory laws and in legislative efforts that aim to restrict how educators talk about gender and sexuality, the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws, etc.,” she says. “School libraries have become an extension of that—kind of an unusual place to become a battleground and contemporary political debate.”
By assembling hundreds of book titles available in public schools across the country, she was able to identify patterns in library resources and materials and how they relate to political interference, book bans and state laws.
Dr. Slungaard Mumma notes two important findings in her research. Firstly, broadly speaking, the availability of certain kinds of controversial content, such as books that contain LGBTQ narratives, is related in expected ways to how conservative or liberal a local community is. For example, a school located in a more conservative district is less likely to have titles about narratives surrounding racism and abortion in its library.
This isn’t a groundbreaking revelation, she says. But it’s a new fact that is now backed up by research. The political makeup of a district directly impacts the contents of its school libraries.
“What was surprising to me is that even though that was the case, in many cases at least some of these materials were available in all libraries, including in the most conservative areas,” she says. “So it wasn’t that there were libraries that seemed to have no LGBTQ content, or at least there weren’t many of those. It was more a matter of the degree of content availability.”
Her second finding, which she believes warrants further research, focuses on the relationship between book challenges and the acquisition of new LGBTQ+ titles. Districts that challenged books in the previous school year were much less likely to add newly published LGBTQ+ titles the following year.
“It suggests that this political fervor around schools—the way that culture wars have entered classrooms and school buildings—could be having repercussions not just affecting individual books that are included in book challenges, but also in terms of impacting the kinds of books that librarians feel comfortable selecting on an ongoing basis.”
Why this matters
Censoring what students can and cannot read within school walls is a chilling issue depending on your politics, she explains. For students who want their school libraries to accurately reflect the student population, such efforts are especially troubling.
“There are people who might align themselves with parents’ rights movements, etc., who see this as a necessary rebalancing and an opportunity for parents to exert control and influence over the kinds of content, ideas, materials, stories, challenging material, etc., that their kids encounter in the classroom,” she says.
“On the other hand, if you’re someone who’s much more concerned about potential ramifications for free speech in schools, if you’re someone who’s more concerned about diverse representation in classroom materials or about books providing stories and ideas that are challenging and also interesting and reflective of experiences, then on the flip side you might be very concerned and see these efforts as constricting that and amounting to censorship.”
Only time will tell whether restricting students’ access to controversial materials will have a lasting impact on students, she concludes in her research. As PEN America put it in its most recent report on book bans in the U.S., “We should heed this warning.”
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