Banned books and Maryland schools
ReadingList does not currently track any books that have been formally challenged, removed, or restricted in Maryland school districts through the public reporting sources we monitor (PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom). That can mean two distinct things:
- No challenges have been formally reported through the organizations PEN America and ALA aggregate from. Many district-level challenges happen quietly at school-board meetings without reaching national trackers, so absence of data is not proof of absence of challenges.
- Maryland has comparatively low challenge volume relative to states like Florida, Texas, Iowa, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, which together account for the majority of formally reported public-school book challenges since 2021.
For parents, teachers, librarians, and students in Maryland researching this topic, the most useful context comes from the national landscape. Below are titles that are most frequently challenged across all US public schools — books that often appear on assigned-reading lists in Maryland and elsewhere despite being challenged in other states.
Most-challenged titles nationally
BelovedToni Morrison · 870L
Brave New WorldAldous Huxley · 870L
Bridge to TerabithiaKatherine Paterson · 810L
I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsMaya Angelou · 1070L
Invisible ManRalph Ellison · 950L
Maus: A Survivor's TaleArt Spiegelman
MonsterWalter Dean Myers · 670L
New KidJerry Craft
Of Mice and MenJohn Steinbeck · 630L
Persepolis: The Story of a ChildhoodMarjane Satrapi
Slaughterhouse-FiveKurt Vonnegut · 850L
SpeakLaurie Halse Anderson · 690L
How Maryland compares
Most book challenges in US public schools happen at the district or individual-school level, not statewide. A single state board rarely bans a title outright; instead, individual districts respond to parent complaints, board-member petitions, or state legislation requiring committee review. For policy specific to Maryland, the Maryland Department of Education is the authoritative source: marylandpublicschools.org. They publish challenge-response procedures, instructional materials review policies, and state-mandated reading standards that frame how individual districts may handle a parent challenge to an assigned text.
Reporting a challenged book in Maryland
If you are aware of a book that has been removed, restricted, or formally challenged in a Maryland school or district — and is not yet listed by PEN America or the ALA — you can report it directly to those organizations. Their public indexes are how titles like the ones above became publicly trackable in the first place.
- PEN America submission form: pen.org/banned-book-list
- ALA Challenge Reporting Form: ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/challengereporting