This week, we celebrate Banned Books Week, the annual recognition of our right to read. But sometimes, it seems like some people take Banned Books Week as a dare to censor books instead of reading them. In fact, as we kick…
Tag: challenged for: sexual assault
Arizona School District Pulls Kite Runner from Curriculum Mid-School Year
Students at Williams Field High School in Gilbert, Arizona are looking for answers after Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was abruptly pulled from the curriculum district-wide, just as Honors English 10 classes were to start reading it. Higley Unified School…
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…
West Allegheny Students Petition for Freedom to Read
About 200 students of West Allegheny High School in western Pennsylvania have signed a petition asking that the full text of Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle be restored to the ninth grade reading list, after the assignment was modified…
VICTORY in Michigan: The Bluest Eye Remains in Northville AP Class
In a victory for the freedom to read, the school board in Northville, Michigan voted unanimously last night to keep Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in the curriculum for AP English Literature and Composition. To accommodate parents who had expressed…
CBLDF Joins Defense of The Bluest Eye in Michigan School District
Toni Morrison’s classic novel The Bluest Eye is under fire in yet another school district, with parents in Northville, Michigan saying the book might inspire “deviant behavior” and contains “negative references…against the Christian faith,” among many other complaints. In advance…
CBLDF Signs On to Support Transparency in West Allegheny Curriculum Planning
CBLDF today signed on to a letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Kids’ Right to Read Project urging the West Allegheny, Pennsylvania school board to implement a clear policy regarding selection of curricular materials. Concerns arose after Jeanette Walls’…
Book Challenge Debates Often Fuelled by Willful Ignorance
Last year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David K. Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America was one of seven that were briefly suspended en masse from the school district curriculum in the affluent Dallas enclave of Highland Park. Although the…
Committee Keeps Beloved On FL Summer Reading List After “Porn Content” Challenge
A unanimous committee vote kept Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved on a summer reading list in a Satellite High School in Florida despite a parent’s complaint over what he is calling the “porn content” of the novel. Hamilton…
NC School Board Changes Policy to Keep Challenged Books in Classrooms
Earlier this summer, a unanimous vote successfully kept Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in Buncombe County, North Carolina, classrooms and initiated a necessary discussion about whether existing school policy about how to handle challenged books should be changed. In a…