For children's books on LGBTQ, race, Scholastic had a solution. Librarians weren't happy
Zachary Schermele, USA TODAY
Updated Wed, October 18, 2023 at 2:04 PM MDT·4 min read
Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, is separating some books with LGBTQ themes and discussions of race in a special book fair collection, which elementary schools can opt into – or out of.
It’s not going over well.
The collection – called “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” – was originally curated, the company said, to protect teachers and librarians in the dozens of states and districts that have passed laws or policies prohibiting specific types of books from being in schools.
“These laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted,” the publisher wrote in a public statement Friday.
"We don’t pretend this solution is perfect – but the other option would be to not offer these books at all – which is not something we’d consider," the statement said.
Scholastic pulls controversial book: "A birthday cake for George Washington" yanked over portrayal of slavery
But the effort has dismayed some authors and librarians. One middle school librarian in Louisiana told the School Library Journal she is canceling her book fair this year over the controversy. Some bestselling authors urged schools in recent days to look elsewhere for book fairs.
“So @Scholastic has a No Diversity Option and Librarians have to Opt In to get diverse books now,” wrote Jacqueline Woodson, the award-winning author of the novel “Brown Girl Dreaming,” in a social media post Friday. “Other Options for Book Fairs?”
'Easing the way for book banning extremists'
The controversy demonstrates yet another seemingly rote custom in American society becoming a casualty of culture-war politics. For decades, Scholastic's popular book fairs have been a fall staple of many libraries, especially in public elementary schools, where children near the start of every school year eagerly await the arrival of new books.
In a statement Tuesday, the free speech and literary organization PEN America called on Scholastic to reject any role in accommodating “nefarious laws and local pressures,” or risk being an “accessory to government censorship.”
“What we understand was conceived as a practical adaptation to keep book fairs going in a fraught legal and political climate is clearly at risk of being twisted to accomplish censorious ends,” the group said.
A petition circulating online from Red Wine and Blue, a political group of liberal mothers that is something of an anti-Moms for Liberty, says Scholastic has "eased the way for book banning extremists."
What's behind the surge in book bans? A low-tech website tied to Moms for Liberty
'Diverse' titles in every book fair
Scholastic stressed it provides diverse titles to every book fair. It blamed much of the reproval on misconceptions.
“The biggest misconception is that Scholastic Book Fairs is putting all diverse titles into one optional case,” the company said. “This is not true, in any school, in any location we serve.”
According to a list provided to USA TODAY by Scholastic, some of the roughly 60 titles in the collection include “All Are Welcome,” a children’s book by Alexandra Penfold, which features same-sex and interracial parents. Another is “Justice Ketanji,” by author Denise Lewis Patrick, who charts the path of Ketanji Brown Jackson to becoming the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
Another on the Scholastic list is "Alma and How She Got Her Name" by Juana Martinez-Neal. It's a picture book that has won a Caldecott Medal.
"The little girl, Alma, as well as all of her family are rendered in pencil with the color of their skin being the paper itself, to encourage all children to more easily see themselves in them," Martinez-Neal told USA TODAY in her first comments about challenges to her book.
"Until today, I made no comments. I needed to understand the reasoning behind the banning. I have yet to find out the reasons. I tried so hard to make a book for all young readers, I can only ask why?" Martinez-Neal said. "What is it about the story of a little girl’s name and her family that they want to keep from children? More so, who is deciding to exclude this book?"
Book fair hosts in every state have included the new collection in their fairs, Scholastic spokesperson Anne Sparkman said in an email to USA TODAY. When local laws or policies create content restrictions, many fairs make the collection available during a special time when parents can come, too, she said.
The American Library Association released preliminary data in September showing public libraries have seen a record surge in book banning efforts this year. The organization compiled nearly 2,000 challenges to unique books between January 1 and Aug. 31 of this year. That number is up 20% from the same period last year, ALA said.
"Book fairs are a celebration of reading and a moment that students look forward to each year − their faces light up every time they crack open the pages of a new book," said Brandon Wolf, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. "All students − no matter their background, sexual orientation, or gender identity − deserve that joy, to feel safe and welcomed in schools, and to see their lives reflected in the stories they read."
Zachary Schermele is a breaking news and education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scholastic siloed children's books on LGBTQ and race, librarians say
Scholastic to separate books on race, gender and sexuality for book fairs
Adrian Horton
Wed, October 18, 2023
Photograph: Amy Sussman/WireImage
The children’s book publisher Scholastic said it will separate titles in its elementary school book fairs by race, gender and sexuality, allowing school districts to include or exclude the list.
The decision is a response to dozens of state laws restricting how the topics are discussed in schools, which Scholastic has opposed. Districts can now opt out of the new list, called the Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice catalog, or choose specific titles from it.
Related: ‘Criminal liability for librarians’: the fight against US rightwing book bans
The new catalog of 64 titles includes biographies of the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the civil rights icon John Lewis; the memoir I Am Ruby Bridges, on the experience of desegregating schools; the picture book Change Sings by the poet Amanda Gorman; The Storyteller, a middle grade novel about a Cherokee boy; and the disability-positive titles You Are Enough and You Are Loved.
In a statement last week, Scholastic said it created the separate catalog to continue offering diverse books in a hostile legislative environment that could threaten school districts, teachers or librarians. “There is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 US states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools – mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country,” it said. “Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued or prosecuted.
“We cannot make a decision for our school partners around what risks they are willing to take, based on the state and local laws that apply to their district,” the statement added, “so these topics and this collection have been part of many planning calls that happen in advance of shipping a fair.
“We don’t pretend this solution is perfect – but the other option would be to not offer these books at all – which is not something we’d consider.”
Alongside PEN America, Scholastic has signed an open letter condemning book bans on the state and local level. But the Share Every Story catalog demonstrates the difficulty of continuing to do business in states in which restrictions on diverse titles could put schools and teachers in jeopardy.
Florida, for example, recently passed a law that would allow educators to be fired, and school districts to be sued or fined, for teaching banned material on race, gender or sexuality. Some school districts in the state are now requiring parents to fill out permission slips for their children to attend book fairs.
In a Tuesday statement, PEN America called Scholastic a “valued partner”, but said it disagreed with the publisher’s decision to create the Share Every Story catalog. “We call on Scholastic to explore other solutions so they can reject any role in accommodating these nefarious laws,” the organization said.
“To be clear, it is essential to lay blame on the legislators and activists who are putting Scholastic and other publishers in an impossible bind when it comes to the distribution of a diverse range of books,” the PEN statement continued, noting the “climate of fear” at work in schools and libraries.
But “sequestering books on these topics risks depriving students and families of books that speak to them. It will deny the opportunity for all students to encounter diverse stories that increase empathy, understanding, and reflect the range of human experiences and identities which are essential underpinnings of a pluralistic, democratic society.”
Scholastic hosts about 120,000 book fairs annually, according to the publisher, which began the practice in 1981. The fairs, which generate about $200m in profits shared with schools, reaches about 35 million children annually in all 50 states and internationally.
Why Everyone Is So Mad at … the Scholastic Book Fair?
Rebecca Onion
SLATE
Tue, October 17, 2023
Yung Wing School, P.S. 124, in New York City. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
The Scholastic Book Fair, the still-trucking darling of the nostalgic internet, is in trouble. For weeks, librarians have been reporting an odd experience: When they went to order books for this fall’s book fairs, they were given the option to “opt in” to offer books with LGBTQ+ themes and “diverse” storylines. On Reddit almost a month ago, many librarians corroborated a poster’s firsthand report of this phenomenon unfolding at their school. In a series of TikToks from late September, a librarian told the story of being asked to opt in and saying yes. She followed up with a video of an unboxing of all the books that came in that opt-in collection: Lincoln Peirce’s graphic novel Big Nate: Payback Time!, an installment in a series that has previously been dinged for being too “sexual” (“That would sell like hotcakes,” the librarian remarked); Picture Day, by Sarah Sax, another graphic novel in which a middle-school girl asks another girl on a date; Chris “Ludacris” Bridges’ picture book Daddy and Me and the Rhyme to Be; a John Lewis bio; and a Ketanji Brown Jackson bio, because what’s more controversial than that?
After news of the checkbox spread, Scholastic finally issued a press release in response on Friday. The company called the idea that the fairs “put all diverse titles into one optional case” a “misconception.” Instead, Scholastic said, in order to protect “teachers, librarians, and volunteers” who work in states with laws about critical race theory and discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools from being “fired, sued, or prosecuted,” it had created an “additional collection”—called “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice”—while maintaining that there are still “diverse titles throughout every book fair, for every age level.”
Though the statement is mealy-mouthed, Scholastic is not inventing a threat here. A teacher in Georgia was fired over the summer after a parent complained about her reading to her fifth-grade class Scott Stuart’s My Shadow Is Purple, a book about gender identity that the teacher says she purchased at the school’s book fair. (The teacher is appealing the termination to the state’s board of education.) Last year, one Texas school canceled its Scholastic book fairs, alleging that two students had purchased “adult” books inappropriate for their age at the fairs in the spring. These cases weren’t mentioned in the press release, but they seem to offer a good example of this kind of risk.
Scholastic, a brand name that doesn’t quite rival Disney but comes close in its particular realm, is a great target for right-wing culture warriors: a beloved purveyor of American children’s content that has long been perceived as a giant of the monoculture. The right-wing publisher Brave Books (“Pro-God, Pro-America children’s books”) ran an anti-Scholastic campaign earlier this year, promoting its own right-wing “book fair” by targeting Scholastic directly. If you put your email address into its website, Brave will send you a PDF with images from specific Scholastic books alongside some pronoun-specifying social media bios and personal photos of Scholastic authors. It mentions that Scholastic’s “largest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard” (boogeymen of the populist right) and calls the fair’s books “sick.”
“We all remember the Scholastic Book Fairs of our childhood, with the colorful book displays and the wish-list flyers,” Brave’s anti-Scholastic PDF says. “Scholastic’s iconic Book Fairs have been the primary mode of getting these books into children’s hands.” But the company, Brave warns darkly, is not the same as you remember, and “has had a dramatic shift in its mission and principles.”
On this, people on either side of the political spectrum may now agree. Anti–book banners online thought Friday’s Scholastic press release was far from sufficient, calling the company’s position “craven,” “disgusting,” and “gutless.” “I understand if a librarian needs to separate out certain books because displaying them will put them in danger,” wrote graphic novelist and Scholastic author Molly Knox Ostertag, in a much more understanding response than most. “But I fundamentally don’t think that is a call the publisher should be making for them.”
Scholastic’s down-the-middle response had such a harsh reception in part because its internet audience is made up of bookish people for whom loving the Scholastic Book Fair is a marker of identity and tribe. YouTube is full of Scholastic Book Fair nostalgia videos made by happy nerds who seem to get good viewership simply by remembering how it was. Back in 2017, Vox ran an explainer on the “nostalgic joys of the Scholastic book fair,” citing a since-deleted tweet: “Marry someone who makes you feel the way you felt during scholastic book fair week in grade school.”
Many of these people, I might gently suggest, have no memory of what a toy store the book fair actually can be. I took a photo of my kindergartner’s book fair “wish list” last spring because it was so amazing. In careful handwriting, the aide who accompanied my 5-year-old around the fair preview filled out the list of “titles” she earmarked for purchase: “1. Mini backpack. 2. Bear highlighter pen. 3. Rainbow bookmark. 4. Jelly fish pen.” The litany of tchotchkes continued onto the back for 20 entries, containing not one single book. (She ended up with a book with a mermaid necklace embedded on the cover.) In other words, the Scholastic Book Fair may be iconic, but for many reasons, it was already far from perfect.
Before Scholastic consolidated the national school book-fair market in the 1990s, there were other choices. Will the politics of the book-banning era provoke an undoing of its chokehold on the category? After author Jacqueline Woodson tweeted about Scholastic’s press release, asking for “other options for book fairs,” many replies mentioned collaborations with local indie bookstores, as well as a startup called Literati. (Literati touts its fairs’ lack of trinkets as a selling point.) But while profits from Scholastic’s book fairs fell, for obvious reasons, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company says, the business has now recovered. In September, Scholastic CEO Peter Warwick described the spending at Scholastic book fairs as now “very strong.”
On Monday morning, Scholastic’s official account on X posted a meme-ified viral tweet from 2017. Back then, @emsenesac wrote: “U ever smell the air and it smells like the fourth grade scholastic book fair on a chilly Tuesday in October of 2007”? The replies were not positive. “Cowards!” tweeted one. “Go hug a book burner,” added another. The dreaded “opt-in” box may not be the death of the Scholastic Book Fair this time, but it’s clear the company has so far only found a solution that will make no one happy.
Tue, October 17, 2023
Yung Wing School, P.S. 124, in New York City. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
The Scholastic Book Fair, the still-trucking darling of the nostalgic internet, is in trouble. For weeks, librarians have been reporting an odd experience: When they went to order books for this fall’s book fairs, they were given the option to “opt in” to offer books with LGBTQ+ themes and “diverse” storylines. On Reddit almost a month ago, many librarians corroborated a poster’s firsthand report of this phenomenon unfolding at their school. In a series of TikToks from late September, a librarian told the story of being asked to opt in and saying yes. She followed up with a video of an unboxing of all the books that came in that opt-in collection: Lincoln Peirce’s graphic novel Big Nate: Payback Time!, an installment in a series that has previously been dinged for being too “sexual” (“That would sell like hotcakes,” the librarian remarked); Picture Day, by Sarah Sax, another graphic novel in which a middle-school girl asks another girl on a date; Chris “Ludacris” Bridges’ picture book Daddy and Me and the Rhyme to Be; a John Lewis bio; and a Ketanji Brown Jackson bio, because what’s more controversial than that?
After news of the checkbox spread, Scholastic finally issued a press release in response on Friday. The company called the idea that the fairs “put all diverse titles into one optional case” a “misconception.” Instead, Scholastic said, in order to protect “teachers, librarians, and volunteers” who work in states with laws about critical race theory and discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in schools from being “fired, sued, or prosecuted,” it had created an “additional collection”—called “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice”—while maintaining that there are still “diverse titles throughout every book fair, for every age level.”
Though the statement is mealy-mouthed, Scholastic is not inventing a threat here. A teacher in Georgia was fired over the summer after a parent complained about her reading to her fifth-grade class Scott Stuart’s My Shadow Is Purple, a book about gender identity that the teacher says she purchased at the school’s book fair. (The teacher is appealing the termination to the state’s board of education.) Last year, one Texas school canceled its Scholastic book fairs, alleging that two students had purchased “adult” books inappropriate for their age at the fairs in the spring. These cases weren’t mentioned in the press release, but they seem to offer a good example of this kind of risk.
Scholastic, a brand name that doesn’t quite rival Disney but comes close in its particular realm, is a great target for right-wing culture warriors: a beloved purveyor of American children’s content that has long been perceived as a giant of the monoculture. The right-wing publisher Brave Books (“Pro-God, Pro-America children’s books”) ran an anti-Scholastic campaign earlier this year, promoting its own right-wing “book fair” by targeting Scholastic directly. If you put your email address into its website, Brave will send you a PDF with images from specific Scholastic books alongside some pronoun-specifying social media bios and personal photos of Scholastic authors. It mentions that Scholastic’s “largest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard” (boogeymen of the populist right) and calls the fair’s books “sick.”
“We all remember the Scholastic Book Fairs of our childhood, with the colorful book displays and the wish-list flyers,” Brave’s anti-Scholastic PDF says. “Scholastic’s iconic Book Fairs have been the primary mode of getting these books into children’s hands.” But the company, Brave warns darkly, is not the same as you remember, and “has had a dramatic shift in its mission and principles.”
On this, people on either side of the political spectrum may now agree. Anti–book banners online thought Friday’s Scholastic press release was far from sufficient, calling the company’s position “craven,” “disgusting,” and “gutless.” “I understand if a librarian needs to separate out certain books because displaying them will put them in danger,” wrote graphic novelist and Scholastic author Molly Knox Ostertag, in a much more understanding response than most. “But I fundamentally don’t think that is a call the publisher should be making for them.”
Scholastic’s down-the-middle response had such a harsh reception in part because its internet audience is made up of bookish people for whom loving the Scholastic Book Fair is a marker of identity and tribe. YouTube is full of Scholastic Book Fair nostalgia videos made by happy nerds who seem to get good viewership simply by remembering how it was. Back in 2017, Vox ran an explainer on the “nostalgic joys of the Scholastic book fair,” citing a since-deleted tweet: “Marry someone who makes you feel the way you felt during scholastic book fair week in grade school.”
Many of these people, I might gently suggest, have no memory of what a toy store the book fair actually can be. I took a photo of my kindergartner’s book fair “wish list” last spring because it was so amazing. In careful handwriting, the aide who accompanied my 5-year-old around the fair preview filled out the list of “titles” she earmarked for purchase: “1. Mini backpack. 2. Bear highlighter pen. 3. Rainbow bookmark. 4. Jelly fish pen.” The litany of tchotchkes continued onto the back for 20 entries, containing not one single book. (She ended up with a book with a mermaid necklace embedded on the cover.) In other words, the Scholastic Book Fair may be iconic, but for many reasons, it was already far from perfect.
Before Scholastic consolidated the national school book-fair market in the 1990s, there were other choices. Will the politics of the book-banning era provoke an undoing of its chokehold on the category? After author Jacqueline Woodson tweeted about Scholastic’s press release, asking for “other options for book fairs,” many replies mentioned collaborations with local indie bookstores, as well as a startup called Literati. (Literati touts its fairs’ lack of trinkets as a selling point.) But while profits from Scholastic’s book fairs fell, for obvious reasons, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company says, the business has now recovered. In September, Scholastic CEO Peter Warwick described the spending at Scholastic book fairs as now “very strong.”
On Monday morning, Scholastic’s official account on X posted a meme-ified viral tweet from 2017. Back then, @emsenesac wrote: “U ever smell the air and it smells like the fourth grade scholastic book fair on a chilly Tuesday in October of 2007”? The replies were not positive. “Cowards!” tweeted one. “Go hug a book burner,” added another. The dreaded “opt-in” box may not be the death of the Scholastic Book Fair this time, but it’s clear the company has so far only found a solution that will make no one happy.
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