ST. LOUIS — A new PEN America report states that Missouri leads the nation in “educational intimidation bills” as lawmakers have introduced 30 among the nearly 400 bills countrywide.
Over the past few years, the organization has seen a significant rise in educational gag orders and censorship laws targeted to schools and libraries, dubbed by PEN America as “educational intimidation bills.”
“Under the guise of ‘parental rights,’ nearly 400 of these bills have been introduced that risk empowering ideologues to intervene in the curricular and extracurricular decisions of teachers, librarians and school administrators overriding the judgment of educators and the news of the majority,” the press release states.
PEN America’s new report, “Educational Intimidation: How ‘Parental Rights’ Legislation Undermines the Freedom to Learn,” examines a category of legislation “that has the effect of prompting self-censorship in schools through indirect mechanisms, rather than direct edicts,” according to the release.
The report identifies 392 “educational intimidation bills” introduced in state legislatures between Jan. 2021 and June 2023. The press release states that 39 of which have passed into law in 19 states.
“Of the intimidation bills introduced in 2023, 45% have an anti-LGBTQ+ provision, including the forced outing of students,” the press release states. “Missouri has introduced the most educational intimidation bills in the nation, followed by Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Indiana and Mississippi.”
Most recently in Missouri, Senate Bill 775 went into effect last August, which bans “explicit sexual material” in private and public schools.
In Nov. 2022, PEN America reported nearly 300 books had been collectively banned across Missouri schools since the law, and school districts across the state have taken dozens of books off of shelves.
The organization’s report found that most banned books were targeted for its LGBTQ+ content, its content related to race and racism, sexual content, or all three.
Some books that have been banned across the state include “Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson,” “Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez,” and “The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.”
While no school librarian has been prosecuted under the law, one told Spectrum News many of his colleagues still worry their book collections could lead to a book challenge or violate SB 775.
A similar law was passed this year in Texas. HB 900 requires “private vendors to rate books prior to selling them to school libraries, identifying books that are ‘sexually explicit,’ and those that are ‘sexually relevant,’ ” the report states.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced the federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights Act of 2022,” which states “no school district shall deny to the parent or guardian of a minor child certain rights. Such rights include the ability to fully review the curricula, books and other educational materials used by the school attended by their child.”
The bill did not pass.
These “educational intimidation bills are part of the ongoing “Ed Scare,” according to the PEN America report, which is a “nationwide effort documented by PEN America to foment anger and anxiety about public education; to restrict or prohibit instruction about race, sexuality and gender; and to ban books that address these topics.”
“As part of this Ed Scare, some political activists have used the language of ‘parental rights’ and ‘curricular transparency’ to advance a series of bills and policies that, by design, lay the groundwork for education intimidation,” the report states.
Additionally, Missouri’s SB 4, which passed the state senate but failed to become law, is “a representative example of a curriculum inspection bill,” according to the PEN America report. It would have required public schools to post full-text versions of all curricula, textbooks, sourcebooks and syllabi on a publicly available website and displayed in an “easy-to-search” format, according to the PEN America report.
The report also mentions other Missouri “educational intimidation bills” outside the curriculum and the library, such as teacher inspection bills introduced in 2021.
“Some of these bills propose to allow members of the public to attend and observe any staff and teacher workshops or trainings they wish,” according to the report, which was the intent of House Bill 2189 and SB 645.
“Under both bills, schools would also have been required to record these sessions and make them available to Missouri residents for at least three years after each session,” the report states.
Both bills were unsuccessful.
Sixteen bills nationwide “contain provisions that would require schools to disclose to parents or the general public who among their staff created certain instructional materials,” including Missouri’s HB 2827 and SB 740.
The report states both bills also were unsuccessful.
In Florida, “the foreseen effect of these bills has become a harrowing reality for teachers and students,” according to the report as Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, also described as the “Don’t Say Gay” act in March 2022.
“These intimidation bills are distinct from ‘educational gag orders,’ a class of bills previously documented by PEN America that directly ban what can be taught in classrooms, targeting discussions of race, racism, gender, aspects of American history and other ‘prohibited’ or ‘divisive’ concepts,” the press release states.
“Intimidation bills compound the crisis in public education, casting a chilling effect through new tools that radically expand the avenues for lone parents, government officials and citizens to monitor and exert control over pedagogical decisions.”
To read the full PEN America report, click here.