Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Wednesday that any public school caught with even a single prohibited or “vulgar” book on its library shelves should be docked an entire letter grade under the state's accountability system. Patrick made the proposal during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, where he displayed books he said were so graphic he refused to open them in front of cameras.
Patrick described some of the books found in Texas school libraries as dirty, filthy and vulgar, according to The Batesville Daily Guard, which cited AP reporting on the briefing. He said many schools have failed to remove the books from their shelves despite existing state rules, and argued that campuses found with even one offending title should be knocked down a letter grade in the state's A-F rating system, which already assigns letter grades to Texas public schools.
The stakes behind that proposal are significant. Under state law, the Texas Education Agency commissioner must either close a campus or replace its elected school board and superintendent if that campus racks up five consecutive “F” ratings, according to KVUE. That intervention authority stems from HB 1842, a 2015 law that expanded the state's power to step in at low-performing campuses, meaning a single book violation under Patrick's plan could push a struggling school measurably closer to a state takeover.
A Ratings System Already Under Scrutiny
Patrick's proposal lands just days after the TEA released its 2025-2026 A-F accountability ratings on Aug. 14, which showed 85% of Texas campuses scored a “C” grade or higher while 4% received an “F,” per Community Impact. Those ratings had themselves been delayed for years by legal disputes over standardized testing methods, adding fresh weight to any change that would layer library compliance on top of academic performance metrics.
Why State Officials Turned to Grading Penalties
The push for a grading penalty follows a string of legal setbacks for Texas's earlier book-restriction efforts. A federal judge permanently blocked key provisions of the 2023 READER Act, known as HB 900, in October 2025, ending a requirement that commercial booksellers rate sexual content in books before selling them to schools, according to Teach the Vote, the blog of the Association of Texas Professional Educators. That ruling followed a 2024 Fifth Circuit decision finding that compelled vendor ratings violated the First Amendment.
With that avenue closed, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 13 in 2025, requiring districts to adopt new library acquisition rules, expand parental oversight of checkout records, and ban materials deemed harmful, indecent, profane, or pervasively vulgar, the Texas Association of School Boards has reported. The law also lets parents petition to form local School Library Advisory Councils to oversee book purchases. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission followed in February by updating mandatory school library collection standards, requiring boards to set up formal review processes to keep obscene material off shelves.
Book Bans Already Widespread Across Texas
Texas school districts recorded 1,781 instances of book bans during the 2024-2025 school year, ranking the state second nationally behind Florida, according to PEN America's annual censorship report as cited by the Houston Chronicle. Three Houston-area districts drove much of that total: Katy ISD pulled 513 books, Lamar CISD removed 286, and Fort Bend ISD banned 78, together accounting for nearly half of all documented removals statewide.
The Chronicle's reporting also points to a broader dynamic behind those numbers. A PEN America analysis found 97% of school book bans nationwide were driven by administrators' fear of state penalties and non-compliance rather than explicit legal mandates naming specific titles, with only 3% of removals tied directly to statutory lists. Critics of Patrick's letter-grade proposal are likely to argue it would intensify that same pressure, pushing districts to pull books preemptively rather than risk a rating downgrade.
Courts Have Given Districts Wide Latitude
Legal precedent has increasingly sided with government authority over library shelves. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 10-7 in May 2025 in Little v. Llano County that public library collection decisions amount to allowable government speech, giving local governments broad authority to curate and remove books based on content, according to The Free Speech Center. That decision overturned longstanding circuit precedent limiting viewpoint-based censorship in public libraries, a fight Hoodline has tracked all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear an appeal in the case.
The debate over library content has already reshaped policy in some of the same Houston-area districts named in the PEN America data. Katy ISD banned five additional books and updated its library policy in 2024, and Lamar CISD later joined other Texas districts in changing rules tied to books addressing gender fluidity as Katy ISD weighed similar measures. Patrick's proposal would fold that district-level fight into the state's broader accountability framework, tying a school's academic letter grade directly to what remains on its library shelves.
