How Texas' new school library 'rating' system will work
AUSTIN, Texas — After Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a new policy regulating school library catalogues, book vendors will begin the process of rating books based on their sexual content in the coming months.
HB 900, authored by Republican Jared Patterson, will take effect on September 1, though much of the results of the legislation likely won't be seen for several months after that. Known as the 'READER Act,' HB 900 largely was written in an effort to keep sexually explicit books out of school libraries.
"It's the kind of graphic image that no T.V. would put on their T.V. screen; it's the kind of graphic image that no one would publicize," Governor Abbott said at a public bill signing ceremony earlier this week. "And yet, we have books like that in our schools that are allowing children to see it. It's wrong, and I'm proud to sign HB 900 to eliminate those books from our schools."
The key provision of the bill is its requirement for books to be 'rated' by vendors, in order to be distributed to Texas schools. Distributors will come up with their own ratings for each of the books it supplies to schools, independently of other vendors' ratings, to be submitted by April 1, 2024.
"They will be hard at work, determining how to meet the requirements of those ratings to either rate a book as 'sexually relevant' or 'sexually explicit,'" Shirley Robinson, the executive director of the Texas Library Association, told CBS Austin. "And those are the only types of books that will need to be rated, and then any book that is rated as sexually explicit will be removed from a library."
Robinson said the bill only requires such a rating for sexual content, as opposed to other sensitive subjects. But, as she noted, it's up to each individual vendor to come up with the ratings, which will likely lead to discrepancies between distributors.
"Inherently with any rating, even if you were to look at movie ratings, there is some subjectivity just built into that, based on individual's personal bias and where they are in the country," she said. "One of the things that we know is going to happen is that we will end up with the same book, perhaps being rated differently by different vendors. And in many cases, school libraries work with quite a few vendors throughout the year; even an elementary school library might add hundreds, if not thousands of books to their collection in one school year. And so there's going to be a little bit of confusion as we get started with this."
Within the provisions of the law are guidelines for what merits a work to be 'sexually explicit,' including whether the book contains graphic description of sexual conduct; whether the material "predominantly... or contains multiple repetitions of depictions of" sexual organs; or whether the book "intentionally panders to, titillates, or shocks the reader."
After the April 1 deadline to identify which books are 'sexually explicit,' school districts will then remove those books from their library catalogues. Each September 1, vendors will need to conduct reviews of their catalogues to determine whether any books are 'sexually explicit.'
What remains to be seen is how willing vendors are to comply with Texas' new law, given its uniqueness among state statutes across the country.
"I think the willingness to pressure publishers in order to demonstrate this commitment to the cultural goals... the legislation here is really focused on on sexual and gender-related content, by pressuring businesses, is part of an emerging pattern that we're seeing in the legislature," James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, said. "I think it's it's hard to tell at this moment, I think there are there are some corporations that are reconsidering the profile and the publicity of their commitment [to LGBTQ rights]."
Given that the onus is largely on the individual book vendors to implement these policies, it's possible some distributors could opt not to operate in Texas education. The law requires schools to only work with compliant vendors.
"We're already hearing from vendors, as they're in the early days of trying to even figure out how to go about doing this, that they're going to have to add staff and time," Robinson said. "And the risks to the vendor are pretty great: if they rate a book incorrectly, and then that is that rating is challenged, the book could be removed, and the vendor might not be allowed to sell in the state of Texas, and so they may just walk away from the state."