![]() ![]() ![]() Books were also challenged more frequently in states that had laws restricting lessons on race or LGBTQ lessons, and in areas with conservative groups.Ĭonservative areas are defined in the study as counties which voted for President Donald Trump in the 2020 elections, and liberal areas were defined as those that voted for President Joe Biden. Each new book challenged in a district reduced the probability that the district would buy a new book about LGBTQ characters by 4 percent.īook challenges often did not take place in the most conservative areas, but happened more often in those that just leaned Republican, Slungaard Mumma’s analysis found. The number of challenged titles also matters, she found. ![]() “If it’s true that book challenges are affecting the types of books that school libraries are considering for their collections,” she continued, “that could have much bigger effects than whether a specific title was pulled from the library shelf.” “These challenges have had what we call a chilling effect, reducing the probability that school libraries are buying materials that deal with LGBTQ content or characters,” Slungaard Mumma said. Schools in districts that were subject to a book challenge in the 2021-22 school year were 55 percent less likely to have acquired one of the 65 books about LGBTQ characters published between June and August 2022, according to the study. The study establishes what school libraries already had in stock before the recent push to challenge hundreds of books gained momentum in districts across the country, how that varied with the demographics of the community, and what the changes indicate about the impact of book bans on school libraries in general. Slungaard Mumma assembled data on the availability of hundreds of titles to examine patterns in the types and amount of books schools have and are buying by scraping libraries’ databases. This should be concerning for librarians and advocates focused on students’ access to diverse books and ideas, said Kirsten Slungaard Mumma, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. ![]()
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