President Biden is using the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to go where America’s executive branch has rarely, if ever, ventured before — trying to control what books local school districts make available to their students in their libraries.

In at least two recent cases, the Education Department’s civil rights office has told local school districts in Texas and Georgia that their efforts to remove books that portray graphic sexual imagery violate federal civil rights laws and Title IX rules by creating a “hostile environment” for students in those schools.

“Communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment,” the department said of the Georgia district’s actions.

The district, in Forsyth County northeast of Atlanta, quickly acquiesced after the department announced its investigation into the matter and signed an agreement that requires it to “promote diversity by including in school libraries materials about and by authors and illustrators of all cultures.” The agreement marked the first time the federal agency has used civil rights laws to challenge a local district’s decision regarding reading material in its libraries. 

It’s not likely to be the last, however. A similar investigation of the Granbury Independent School District in Texas was announced after a complaint was filed with the department by the American Civil Liberties Union in that state and remains pending. The ACLU said the removal of sexually explicit material from schools in the conservative town of 11,000 residents outside Fort Worth creates “a pervasively hostile atmosphere by sending a message to LGBTQ students that their identities are obscene and worthy of being censored.”

In June, the White House hinted that such federal interference in the affairs of local districts is not going to be an isolated incident in the Biden administration. As part of a pride month initiative, the White House announced that the office of civil rights in the Education Department would be creating a new coordinator to address what it called “the growing threat that book bans pose for the civil rights of students.”

Throughout American history, the federal government’s responsibilities when it comes to educating students have been limited; states and local school districts have always been tasked with making day-to-day decisions. An expanded role for the department in such minutiae as what books are displayed in school libraries and where — not to mention whether the district’s policies “promote diversity” — would mark a significant expansion of the department’s remit.

In a letter to the department objecting to the Forsyth County agreement, a conservative think tank, the Defense of Freedom Institute, suggests that the actions of the office of civil rights may be illegal under existing federal law. The group says the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979 explicitly prohibits officers of the department from exercising any control over the curricula — including library resources and textbooks — of any school district.

“OCR’s blatant overreach requiring the District to implement the Department’s preferred policy regarding the selection process for library books is breathtakingly illegal in light of these clear limitations of its authority,” the letter states. “Nothing in federal civil rights law requires a school to provide a ‘global perspective’ or promote the Department’s ideas of what constitutes ‘diversity’ in their school libraries.”

The institute says “the Department clearly seeks to blunt the input of parents in school library decisions and actually implies that this parental involvement caused a ‘hostile environment’ in the first place. This Agreement represents nothing less than a new, nationwide template that OCR will use to intimidate parents in their efforts to prevent their children from gaining access to sexually explicit material in school libraries.”