On September 29th, Wyoming City Schools' School Board voted to back Superintendent, Gail Kist-Kline's plan to re-evaluate every non-textbook teachers recommend to students. Staff members will now be asked to rate books based on a new 4-point criteria, which inclues the extent to which a book "could create controversy among students, parents and community groups. However, removing books from reading [...]
Some good and bad news for you today, folks, on the fifth day of Banned Books Week… First the good news: In Pennsylvania, Downingtown West High School followed model procedure in addressing a challenge against Laurie Halse Anderson’s Twisted. We are please to report school officials and parents resolved the issue amicably through discussion. For more information click here. Also [...]
Its Banned Books Week and yet efforts to censor books in the U.S.A continue. In fact, just this past week, Ellen Hopkins, author of the Banned Books Week Manifesto was censored in Norman, Oklahoma. According to Ms. Hopkins, "I was supposed to do a school visit at Whittier Middle School. A parent went in complaining about content in CRANK and [...]
The Kids' Right to Read Project is urging the general public to speak out against book censorship at two high schools, one in Pennsylvania and the other in California where Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle are being challenged. KRRP is calling on supporters of free speech to advocate for students’ right to read everywhere, especially [...]
Being so busy with campaigns promoting “freedom and democracy” in the Middle East and central Asia, it’s hardly surprising that most of us here in the United States are unaware of an archaic and abominable practice that continues here at home - book banning. The Kids’ Right to Read Project (KRRP), a collaboration of NCAC and the American Booksellers Foundation [...]
The twittersphere has been, well, a-twitter (sorry!) about a story this weekend of Amazon pulling media with GLBT content from it’s sales ranking. Search #amazonfail to have a look. The excuse? The books were “adult” materials. However, it became quickly clear that it was GLBT content that was defining “adultness,” rather than the potential age-appropriateness of the content. The impact? [...]
In January, we reported on a Topeka, Kansas woman’s push to move books about sexuality to a restricted section. As Rebecca wrote then, “Restricting books may seem like a fine compromise, but it has a serious chilling effect on library patrons’ reading selection, and adopting such a policy would permit one person to enforce her views on everyone else.” Yesterday, [...]
It has been a busy week for book censorship. On Tuesday, MSNBC reported that The Bookseller of Kabul, a nonfiction account of life inside an Afghan household, was removed from a high school in Wyandotte, Michigan. The book had been assigned for an 11th grade honors English class at Roosevelt High School. MSNBC quotes a former teacher at the school: [...]
We were disappointed to hear that the school board in Newman-Crows Landing Unified School District voted last night to ban Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya from English classes at Orestimba High School. The 4-1 vote in favor of censorship upholds the superintendent’s decision to pull the book. In January, the Kids’ Right to Read Project was joined by PEN [...]
Students at New Rochelle High School found that pages from their reading assignment, Girl Interrupted, had been ripped out. Turns out: school officials pulled the pages to remove content they deemed "inappropriate" because of sexual content and profanity. It appears that the books were censored without first undergoing a formal review process. NCAC is working on a formal response to [...]
2009 is approaching, and as we plan our next year, we want to know: what censorship issue is nearest and dearest to you? Your answers can help shape this blog and the kind of projects NCAC pursues. Feel free to write in answers. And send it along to friends and frenemies. [polldaddy poll="1158458"]
No. As The Birmingham News reports: According to the ALA's office for intellectual freedom, there were 420 documented attempts to ban books from libraries nationwide last year, and up to four times as many unreported attempts". What gets banned? "Topping the list typically are novels written for young adults, and fantasy books such as the Harry Potter series. The Potter [...]
LOS ANGELES TIMES Friday, October 17, 1997 The first round of papers has been filed in a federal appeals court in San Francisco challenging the constitutionality of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. At the same time, the new movie version of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita, starring Jeremy Irons, is opening all over Europe, even though it is not [...]
Penny Culliton, a New Hampshire teacher who fought back against attempts to smear and ultimately fire her, has been reinstated by the Mascenic School Board following a decision of the state's Public Employee Labor Relations Board. The Labor Board upheld an arbitrator's previous award that had turned Culliton's dismissal into a one-year suspension.