Tag: illinois

Bradbury Biographer Warns of Dystopian Future Without School Librarians

Few would disagree that in the current context of rampant misinformation, students in public schools must be trained to seek out reliable facts and assess sources. Nevertheless, every year more and more school librarians–the professionals who teach those exact skills–are…

Parent Group Demands Changes or Cancellation for Illinois High School’s Civil Rights Seminar Day

Some parents in the northern suburbs of Chicago are complaining that an innovative all-day seminar on civil rights at New Trier High School will be “biased, unbalanced, [and] divisive.” Award-winning authors Andrew Aydin and Colson Whitehead are scheduled to speak…

Illinois High School Discontinues God of Small Things, Cites Lack of Initial Approval

A Chicago-area high school has discontinued use of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in its English curriculum, saying that the novel had not gone through the initial approval process outlined in district policy and contained “subject matter in…

Illinois Enacts Law to Protect Student Journalists Rights

Last month, New Jersey celebrated free speech with the consideration of a bill that will allow student journalists to exercise editorial control over content in school publications. Illinois is following suit with the passing of a law that grants students…

Dapier Receives Intellectual Freedom Award for Persepolis Research

Jarrett Dapier, the library science scholar whose Freedom of Information Act Request helped to uncover the truth about Chicago Public Schools administrators’ 2013 effort to ban Persepolis from classrooms and libraries, is receiving some well-earned recognition from the American Library…

High School Reading Assignments Challenged in Illinois, New Jersey

Banned Books Week is barely over, but book challenges continue around the country! Today we got word that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was pulled from a high school English class in Mattoon, Illinois before students could…