Senator Andrew Zwicker is a physicist and a member of the New Jersey Senate representing Central NJ’s 16th Legislative District. He serves as Chair of the Legislative Oversight Committee, Vice-Chair of the Higher Education and Labor Committees, and sits on the Budget and Appropriations Committee. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers named him as one of the 75 leading contributors to physics education in the U.S., and the R&D Council of NJ named him the 2023 Educator of the Year. Andrew was raised in Englewood, NJ where his love of learning and passion for science came from his mother, a public school English teacher, and father, a chemical engineer. Tomorrow morning Gov. Phil Murphy will sign his Freedom To Read Act.
When I was a young boy, I developed an early love of reading that my mother, a public high school English teacher, nourished. She and I often went to the library together, and she filled my nightside table with books for me to read before falling asleep. While book banning has been an issue for as long as there have been books, my mother would have been flabbergasted that in 2024, we are fighting for something as fundamental as the freedom to read, with an unprecedented number of books under attack in our nation’s public schools.
In the 2023-24 academic year, PEN America tracked more than 10,000 book bans in public schools, and the stories being silenced are disproportionately those of marginalized communities:
37% of banned books center on characters of color or themes of race and racism;
36% explore LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
This is not a coincidence. These bans are a deliberate effort to erase voices and perspectives that challenge the status quo, often under the guise of protecting children from discomfort and inappropriate material.
And the vast majority of book ban attempts are instigated by a small number of people. According to the Washington Post, 11 people were responsible for 60% of the book ban attempts across the country in the 2021-2022 school year. In other words, less than a dozen people attempted to decide what thousands of students could read, instead of leaving the decision in the hands of parents.
Let’s be clear. Parents can insist that their child not be allowed to check out a particular book, and that request should be honored. But when another adult attempts to ban a book for your child, they are saying they know better than you what your child should or should not read.
Book bans often conflate uncomfortable themes, like race, sexuality, or identity, with obscenity. Of course, the law requires more than discomfort to warrant removal, and no librarian has been arrested for simply doing their job. The mere mention of sex or sensitive content does not make a book inappropriate. American stories from Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye contain passages with sexually explicit content, but they also offer profound insights into the human experience and tackle difficult societal issues that promote understanding and empathy.
The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of expression, including the right to access a wide range of ideas and perspectives. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that public libraries and schools are essential to the marketplace of ideas, where access to information should not be restricted based on arbitrary or politically motivated claims of obscenity.
The vast majority of educators— those closest to our students—oppose book bans. A 2023 survey found that 87% of educators believe book bans are rarely or never justified. And when books are banned, it doesn’t just undermine the expertise of educators— it distracts them from teaching and increases their stress. More importantly, it denies students the opportunity to engage with developmentally appropriate diverse, challenging, and thought-provoking ideas that foster empathy and critical thinking.
Fortunately, librarians around the country are bravely pushing back against these attempts at censorship even though they know that they will likely face horrific attacks online and in-person, risking their career, their mental health, and their professional reputation.
On April 16, 2023, I met a librarian by the name of Martha Hickson, who, in the face of relentless attacks, stood up and spoke out against the attempts at censorship in her library. I asked her what we could do in New Jersey to stop these attacks, and she pointed me to a variety of resources and examples of what other states had proposed. From that initial conversation, the NJ Freedom to Read Act was born.
The legislation empowers local communities to engage in a transparent, thoughtful process when determining which books should remain in libraries. By involving parents, students, and librarians, the process ensures diverse input rather than relying on unilateral decisions driven by a small, vocal minority. The bill recognizes the expertise of educators and librarians, who are best suited to evaluate educational content, and it ensures protections for those acting in good faith.
Summary of the NJ Freedom to Read Act:
- Highlights that the Freedom to Read is a human right protected by the Constitution of the United States;
- Charges the NJ Department of Education with establishing a model book removal procedure, in consultation with the New Jersey State Librarian, New Jersey School Boards Association, and New Jersey Association of School Librarians;
- Requires that boards of education must, at a minimum, adopt this procedure for their public and school libraries to adhere to but can go above and beyond the model policy;
- As part of that model policy, requires that the board selected to review the material include an array of community members, including the librarian, a parent or guardian of a student enrolled in the school district, and a student enrolled in the district;
- Sets parameters for how quickly a determination must be made and requires a written explanation for the determination. The determination in public libraries is binding for five years, so the same material cannot continuously be re-challenged.
- States that only an individual with a vested interest, defined as a resident who is served by the public library or resides in a county or municipality where a library is situated, can challenge a book;
- Affirms that a board of education shall allow a student to reserve or check out any developmentally appropriate library material, including diverse and inclusive material, and that materials cannot be removed due to the material’s origin, background, or point of view;
- Further, to protect library employees when performing their duties in good faith, the “Freedom to Read Act” reaffirms protections for library staff against civil and criminal lawsuits as a result of following state laws while doing their job.
After many months of meetings with librarians, school administrators, and stakeholders across a wide variety of viewpoints, from the NJ ACLU to parents’ rights groups, the NJ Freedom to Read Act received bipartisan support when it passed in both the Senate and the General Assembly. Tomorrow, December 9, 2024, Governor Phil Murphy will sign it into law.
In summary, the freedom to read is quite simple— YOU have the freedom to choose what you want to read, and PARENTS will continue to have the freedom to choose what their children read. But no one else gets to decide for YOU.
