The Department of Education is Ending its Civil Rights Investigations Related to Book Bans

Here's what you need to know.

Last week, the Department of Education announced it is dismissing 17 book-related complaints to its Office of Civil Rights, including 11 that were already under investigation.¹ In a petulantly worded press release, the department called the complaints part of “Biden’s ‘book ban’ hoax” and simultaneously announced that it is eliminating the position of “book ban coordinator” that was established in response to the massive wave of book removals that has hit American schools in the last four years.

A lot of responses to this announcement have focused on the word “hoax” and sought to assert the very real existence of the censorship that groups like PEN America and the American Library Association have been tracking for years.

And while that focus is understandable, the bigger issue is what the OCR’s decisions mean to students in the districts where the complaints were filed.

To me, the key sentence in the department’s release is this one, from its first paragraph:

The complaints alleged that local school districts’ removal of age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene materials from their school libraries created a hostile environment for students – a meritless claim premised upon a dubious legal theory.

That’s a lie. Civil Rights complaints, by definition, aren't about sexual content, and the books removed aren't "obscene." These cases are about targeted efforts to remove books about the experiences of LGBTQ people and other minority groups.

One of the complaints the OCR dismissed came from Granbury ISD, where in 2022 the superintendent was secretly recorded telling a group of librarians, “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”

Similarly, in Keller ISD, the OCR complaint originated not from removals of books for sexual content, but for the district’s policy forbidding (i.e., banning) any books discussing or depicting “gender fluidity.” As the ACLU pointed out in its complaint, several of the trustees who voted to enact the policy (which is inherently discriminatory) justified their votes with blatantly anti-LGBTQ reasoning. Keller’s policy has been copied by Katy ISD, where students are blocked from checking out books like Raina Telgemaier’s Drama and historical accounts of the Stonewall riots.

Cases like these are exactly what the Office of Civil Rights was established to investigate. And OCR complaints have proven to be useful tools in Texas for fighting school book bans. For one thing, in a state like Texas, they are often the only way to get any kind of relief for or even official acknowledgement of the harms that book bans are doing. But more than that, they’re a deterrent—I’ve watched on several occasions trustees choose not to enact a harmful policy while specifically pointing out that similar policies in nearby districts have led to OCR investigations.

All that is over now.

Of course, we expected an announcement like this, childish tone and all. The OCR’s statement is part of a barrage of movements by the new administration designed not just to signal a change in direction from the Biden era, but to utterly reverse and raze its assumptions. It is absolutely connected to, for example, the Department of Labor’s announcement that they’re ending all investigations related to workplace discrimination. And the executive order declaring (contrary to science) that everyone fits into a neat binary of “male” or “female,” which can be simply determined at birth conception. The idea with all of these is just to assert reality, no matter the facts, and deny power to anyone who might challenge those assertions.

This is what I meant when I wrote in November that those of us who oppose censorship are now in a bad place. But the good news is that, in Texas at least, we’re used to operating in a bad situation. We’re tough. And we know our task, which isn’t just fighting these battles but also recording and publicizing their effects. We have truth on our side and the long view in mind.

1. I highly recommend Kelly Jensen’s line-by-line analysis of the press release.