Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, likens the ongoing fight against legislation intended to restrict what teachers can teach to a game of whack-a-mole.

“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors to ramp up harmful bills against educators and librarians,” she told Truthout. While she says that a wide array of so-called “parent’s rights” groups — in addition to well-known organizations like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education — newer groups like the explicitly Christian organization Mama Bears Rising are continuing to push book bans and censorship and are attempting to restrict what students are exposed to in public school classrooms.

“The goal is to build mistrust and distrust among public school parents that will disrupt public education,” Meehan told Truthout. “Their agenda relies on stoking parental fears about the corruption of children and the end of childhood innocence.” This, she explained, is why right-wing rhetoric has turned from opposition to books about the role of race and racism in United States history to language about children reading “obscene” or “pornographic” materials in school.

But the tide may be turning as a variety of resistance tactics are on the rise. These tactics include lawsuits against book bans and censorship, complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by librarians fired for violating book display restrictions, the introduction of legislation at the state and federal levels to protect educators from arbitrary firings, and grassroots organizing by new and established groups to support inclusive curricula.

Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken notice, conceding in February that groups like Moms for Liberty (groups he referred to as “bad actors”) had filed a slew of frivolous legal challenges to books they deemed “offensive,” including dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as fiction, nonfiction, biographies, science and anatomy texts.

Moreover, in mid-March his administration agreed to a legal settlement that allows teachers to discuss gender and sexuality with students, stipulating that this is permissible as long as the topics are not part of what the settlement describes as “official instructional materials.” The settlement also sanctions school-based gender and sexuality alliances and limits outside groups from filing challenges to curricular content. Going forward, the settlement also mandates that only parents whose children are enrolled in a particular school can file objections to books or other subject matter.

The National Education Association (NEA), a union representing approximately 3 million educators, is front and center in fighting back. They are, for example, championing middle school English teacher Alyson Browder and several other Iowa Education Association members, publisher Penguin Random House, a parent, a student, and censored authors, including Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo and Jodi Picoult in a federal lawsuit to overturn legislation passed in May 2023........

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