Texas Is Threatening Schools Over Books. Florida Has Seen This Playbook Before.

Last week, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick stood at a press conference and issued a warning to public schools: remove books he considers inappropriate or risk consequences. Patrick said he plans to pursue legislation in the next legislative session that would lower a school district’s A-F accountability rating by one letter grade if it fails to remove books deemed prohibited. “We’re coming for the books,” he told school districts. (Texas Tribune)

That threat matters because Texas accountability ratings are supposed to measure academic performance. They can also carry serious consequences, including state intervention in chronically low-performing districts. Patrick is proposing turning that academic accountability system into an enforcement mechanism for library censorship, potentially punishing an entire school district because of a single book on a library shelf. (San Antonio Express-News)

Patrick's campaign centers on a list of roughly 2,200 books compiled not by the Texas Education Agency, a committee of educators, or professional librarians, but by conservative activist Bonnie Wallace of Recover America. Wallace rates books on a scale based on what she considers sexually explicit or vulgar content, and Patrick has elevated that privately compiled list as evidence that Texas schools are failing to comply with Senate Bill 13, the library law passed in 2025.

The List Is Not a Texas Government List

That distinction is important. 

Texas has not created an official list of 2,200 books that schools are legally required to remove, and Patrick himself said SB 13, rather than a specific list, determines what violates the law. Yet schools are now being publicly threatened with future penalties while standing in the shadow of a list created by a private activist. 

The list reportedly draws from multiple sources, including partisan book-rating organizations, books prohibited in Texas prisons, and titles targeted by activists elsewhere in the country. Two of those influences come directly from Florida. Reporting on Wallace's list notes that it incorporates titles targeted by prolific book challengers in Clay County and Santa Rosa County, Florida. These book challengers have contributed to hundreds of removals across the state.

What is clear is that Florida's censorship campaign is feeding Texas's. Books targeted by one activist in one Florida county can become entries in a Texas activist's database, which can then be held up by one of the state's most powerful politicians as justification for threatening schools statewide.

That is precisely the problem with censorship lists. They travel.

Texas Is Threatening Books Texas Itself Recommends

The contradictions become even clearer when we look at some of the books caught in the net.

Among the titles on the list is Elie Wiesel's Night, the Nobel laureate's memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The Texas State Board of Education has approved Night as required reading for eighth graders beginning in 2030 as part of the state's Holocaust education standards. The Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission has also endorsed the book as an important resource. (Houston Chronicle)

Other works flagged on the list reportedly include Lois Lowry's The Giver and Langston Hughes's poem “Dreams,” along with widely taught books such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Color Purple, and The Kite Runner. 

That should raise an obvious question: If the state itself considers a book educationally valuable enough to recommend or require, how can a privately created list simultaneously be used to suggest that a school is violating the law by carrying it?

This is what happens when lists replace context. A database cannot determine whether a book has literary merit, whether difficult material is essential to understanding the work, why a librarian selected it, or which students the book is intended to serve. Those decisions require professional judgment and consideration of a work as a whole.

Florida Already Showed Us What Threats Can Do

For parents in Florida, the tactic feels familiar even if Patrick's specific proposal to manipulate school accountability grades is new.

When Florida enacted HB 1467, HB 1069, and related policies, librarians and educators repeatedly heard warnings about the possible consequences of distributing material deemed harmful to minors. The threat of criminal liability became part of the conversation surrounding implementation and was even added to a required annual training released in 2023. Long before courts determined that individual books violated obscenity standards, appointed state officials started demanding removals of titles found on a list created by a special interest group to minimize the risk of possible punitive action. (Popular Information)

The result was anticipatory obedience. Books disappeared not necessarily because a court had ruled them illegal, but because administrators feared what might happen if they left them available. Since 2022, Florida's Department of Education has reported hundreds of school-library removals, including works by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Kurt Vonnegut. (Associated Press)

Patrick's threat creates the same incentive on an even larger scale. If a superintendent believes that one controversial title could someday cost the district an entire letter grade, the safest administrative response is obvious: remove anything that might attract attention. The punishment does not even need to be imposed for the threat to change behavior.

Texas Freedom to Read Project Is Documenting What We Cannot See

That makes the work of Texas Freedom to Read Project especially important. Formal book challenges and highly publicized school board votes represent only part of what censorship looks like in Texas schools. Many removals happen quietly through internal reviews, administrative directives, collection audits, purchasing restrictions, and decisions made before anyone files a formal challenge.

Since SB 13 took effect, TXFTRP volunteers have been using public information requests and local records to document what is happening district by district. Their research has already revealed hundreds of removals in individual districts and more than 100 classic, acclaimed, and award-winning works removed across Texas schools during the 2025-26 school year. Their list includes Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners as well as works that have been taught for generations. (Texas Freedom to Read Project)

In New Braunfels ISD alone, TXFTRP documented the removal of more than 600 books and age restrictions placed on more than 800 additional titles following a sweeping collection review. Among the books affected were Lonesome Dove, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Three Musketeers, and even Guinness World Records. (Texas Freedom to Read Project)

The statewide picture is still being assembled, but TXFTRP's records work is revealing the scale of quiet censorship that ordinary ban counts can miss. This is exactly why documenting implementation matters. When thousands of books can be reviewed, restricted, relocated, or removed through internal processes, the public cannot rely only on formal challenge statistics to understand what students have lost access to.

This Is About the Next Legislative Session

Patrick's announcement should also be understood in its political context. SB 13 has been in effect for only one school year, and lawmakers have already directed the Senate Education Committee to monitor its implementation and recommend additional legislation. Patrick is also running for reelection in 2026.

Against that backdrop, a press conference featuring provocative book covers, a privately assembled list of thousands of titles, and the declaration that “we're coming for the books” looks less like a measured assessment of SB 13's implementation and more like an effort to build political momentum for the next round of censorship legislation. Patrick is framing schools as defiant before Texas has even fully reckoned with how many books the current laws have already caused to disappear.

Texans should not allow that framing to go unchallenged. Before lawmakers pass another censorship bill, they should have to answer for the consequences of the laws already on the books.

What Texans Can Do Now

If you live in Texas, connect with the parents behind the Texas Freedom to Read Project. Follow their research, learn what is happening in your district, attend school board meetings, and ask your state legislative candidates where they stand on library censorship.

Most importantly, tell candidates that the freedom to read is an issue you are watching and an issue you will vote on. Ask whether they support using academic accountability ratings to punish schools over library books. Ask whether they believe one private activist's list should influence what millions of Texas students can access.

Elections determine who writes the next round of laws. Candidates need to know before Election Day that voters are paying attention.

And This Threat Is Bigger Than Texas

The same strategy is moving at the federal level, where several bills could use federal education funding and federal policy to impose broad restrictions on schools nationwide.

S. 4925 and H.R. 7661, both titled the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, would prohibit certain federal education funds from being used to provide or promote materials defined as “sexually oriented.” That definition is broadly written, but explicitly includes material involving “gender dysphoria or transgenderism”. While the legislation creates exceptions for government-defined categories of “classic” literature, it leans on an outdated list from 1990 and a Christian homeschool curriculum. (Publishers Weekly)

H.R. 8705, the Civics and History Advancement to Restore Learning, Integrity, and Education Act (the CHARLIE Act), would place federal restrictions on what certain American history and civics funding can support and relies on language in a 2025 Executive Order. H.R. 2616, the Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, has already passed the House and would condition certain federal education funding on policies involving gender markers, pronouns, preferred names, and sex-based accommodations. The bill is written broadly enough that it is likely to impact student access to affirming or supportive materials.

The details of these bills differ, but the larger concern is familiar: using government funding and political power to pressure schools into narrowing what students can read, learn, and encounter.

Florida showed us what happens when fear of punishment drives decisions about books. Texas is showing us how quickly those tactics can spread, and how lists created by a handful of activists can gain the imprimatur of powerful government officials.

We should not wait to see what happens when that model becomes national policy.

Tell your state and federal representatives that decisions about what millions of students can read should not be dictated by a politician at a press conference, a private censorship spreadsheet, or a handful of people in Washington. Protect local communities, professional educators, parental choice, and the freedom to read.