Why This English Teacher-Turned-Library Leader Is Optimistic About the End of Book Bans

Daniel Montgomery’s love of books started as a youngster with weekly visits to the public library, which fittingly led him to a nearly two-decade career as an English teacher.

As an educator, he became a union leader. That led to another long tenure, this time as president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, where he was first elected president in 2010.

Montgomery will take those experiences with him this fall when he starts his role as the American Library Association’s executive director in November.

Daniel Montgomery will join the American Library Association as its next executive director in November. Photo courtesy of ALA.

“I see a lot of the same issues that I’ve dealt with over the years at the union, and that is tight budgets — federal, state, and local budgets are unfortunately always tight for education and libraries,” he says. “And right now there’s kind of an unprecedented toxic environment in terms of people wanting to restrict what other people are allowed to read or have access to, which is not something we consider to be fully in the American tradition of free speech and free association.”

EdSurge talked to Montgomery about why, despite these challenges, he’s optimistic that the tide will turn against book banning — and why students love the type of books that political groups want yanked off the shelves.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: My impression of teachers unions is that these are the people who are going to speak out really strongly, and they’re not afraid of confrontation, when they believe something is harming teachers or students. Coming from teachers unions, do you feel like you’re a fighter? Is that something that’s going to be useful in your new role at ALA?

Daniel Montgomery: On the one hand, unions are different than the library association. The unions represent people under contract in workplaces, so it’s a somewhat different context. ALA members who are in any union may go on strike from time to time, but I think the biggest part of ALA is we also represent libraries, not just librarians and library workers. So things like strikes are probably not the way the ALA moves in the world.

But I think that there’s no question the ALA needs to be and will be assertive on the protection of libraries and librarians and the patrons’ rights to access information and library services freely and without obstruction.

Illinois is very much like the rest of the United States. We have very, very blue areas where generally you’re not finding people wanting to ban books, though not exclusively or always. And these more conservative, socially and culturally conservative, areas that are redder, if you will just use that shorthand, and that’s the same with libraries all over America.

What I know is true — I think it’s true in education, and it’s true for libraries — it doesn’t matter if you live in a more conservative part of the country or a more liberal part of the country, if you will. People want libraries, and they want the services that libraries provide. That’s universal.

Book bans and proposed book bans come from a small subset of the same people over and over again, so I would never say there’s this pandemic of book bans. There’s more than there’s been, and I think that will pass over time, but citizens and communities have risen up to oppose them and say, ‘We love our libraries, we love our librarians, and we don’t want to tell other people what they’re allowed to read.’

If you could predict what book banning would look like this upcoming school year, what would you say? The data shows there are not as many as past years, but there are still a lot.

It’s really hard to predict.

Here’s this one thought: A couple years ago, there were school board elections here in Illinois for almost every school board. It was 2023, a big election year for school boards. In a lot of communities, there were candidates running who really ran on an agenda of book bans.

Those people were roundly defeated — something like 80 percent of those candidates lost. And where they won, they won maybe one seat on a board, they didn’t sweep the whole board. So I take great heart in that. The book bans spread a bit like a virus because people hear about them, some people activate, and in this cultural moment, there’s folks who like the sort of trigger of the culture war, if you will.

But that’s not what most people want. Most people don’t want yelling and screaming and division at their township library board meetings or their school board meetings. They want well-resourced schools. They want well-resourced libraries with a lot of services.

It’s hard to predict, but I think we’re going to see slowly over time these book ban efforts sort of ebb away as, one, they’re unsuccessful, and two, they sort of trigger a lot of other people in the community to come out and say, ‘Wait a minute. We’re not going to do that here. We love our libraries. We want people to have full access to the information and services they need.’

I have to say, this is the first time I’ve heard anybody be optimistic about this. My follow-up question was going to be whether it takes people speaking up against book bans to make a difference.

It definitely does. It might not make a lot of news in the community, sometimes it can be more subtle. A parent wants to challenge materials in a library, for instance. It’s not necessarily a big news story.

But once people hear about it, in most communities you see a very fierce opposition and parents and community members standing up and saying no.

Researchers have said pretty clearly that book bans, particularly school book bans, are part of an effort to build mistrust of libraries, of public education. But it sounds like you think that that kind of attempt to drive a wedge between the public and their libraries isn’t going to be successful.

Yeah, I think people trust their libraries. There is polling that’s been done over the years [showing] libraries are often some of the most valued institutions in any community. You can just see that in practice because people rely on them.

Now you can go there and you can rent cooking implements, get help with your taxes or help in starting a small business, and just the very simple but crucial aspect of internet access. In a lot of our rural communities, there’s still not broadband internet widely available to people, and the library is the place where they can get it.

It’s incumbent on us to really make the argument to people again for why public libraries are so necessary and vital to our democracy, and to the everyday life of American families. I like to point that out because things like democracy and freedom are very broad, big ideas. They’re hard to wrap your mind around sometimes. But the vital services that American families depend on, people know what that is. You see sometimes with budget cuts where libraries might have to reduce some hours or [services], the community rises up and says, ‘No, we don’t want that.’

People want libraries, and they want the services that libraries provide. That’s universal.

— Daniel Montgomery

The premise of your question is valid, that there are folks that want to sow distrust in institutions. But I’ll tell you, we do a lot of polling in the [American Federation of Teachers] on public schools. Public schools still poll very, very high. Despite what you might hear, complaints about America’s public schools, people love their public schools.

They do love teachers. Next to nurses and firefighters, teachers are right up there. And the same with libraries and librarians. They’re trusted people, but we have to remember that.

When people want to remove books like “The Hate U Give” or “All Boys Aren’t Blue” from schools, others might think, ‘What does it matter if these are removed from the school library if parents can buy it, or you can get it from the public library?’ Why is it important for the kids who use those libraries to have access to some of these books when you could say, ‘Just get them outside of school?’

There’s two answers to that. One of them is that school is constant for children. They usually are in school for a tremendous amount of hours and over the course of years, so it’s a real dereliction of duty in this country if adults allow schools not to have fully outfitted and staffed libraries.

Every school in America should have a library and a certified school librarian, and that’s just good for kids. There should be a rich array of materials available for their use and education, and librarians know what’s age appropriate, teachers know what’s age appropriate, and they make those kinds of curricular recommendations to kids all the time.

But a lot of kids don’t have access to the public library, or their parents might not have a car to take them to the public library, but they’re in school. So to me, the argument that, ‘Well, they can get it elsewhere,’ doesn’t really hold water for that matter. The end point is every school should have a richly resourced school library for its students.

And there are school boards that determine curriculum, so it’s not as if it’s the wild west of access. Grossly inappropriate material, that just doesn’t happen. What happens, unfortunately, is some people don’t like the idea that there’s freedom for children to access materials that they may not personally agree with. But again, the basis of our country is the freedom of the press, the freedom of association. All our freedoms are not based on just what my individual personal ideal is about what’s appropriate for you.

I spent a lot of time asking about book bans, but what do you think are going to be some of the other issues around libraries that are going to be important to watch this fall and beyond?

We’re all very worried about the budget. The Trump administration has [made] cuts to education. For the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the money is frozen up, and that’s being challenged in court. But really the federal government gives a minuscule fraction of its budget to libraries and museums and programs like that, so it’s kind of small potatoes in the federal budget but a huge issue for states and libraries.

There’s really no library that’s got too many resources. State budgets, as well, are being cut because the states are so worried about losing money under Trump’s huge effort to cut things that states [need]. Now the Big Bad Bill, which is going to [cut] Medicaid reimbursements, that’s a huge budgetary hole for states. And states give grants to libraries, too. So there’s a lot of budgetary uncertainty, and that’s the primary thing that I am thinking about right now in addition to the book bans.

If we have these federal budget cuts trickle down, what are some of the ways that we might see that play out in communities? Could libraries shorten their hours? Could they stop providing certain services? Lay people off?

All of the above. We’ve had the financial collapse, 2008, and COVID, all sorts of tough financial times, and communities are constantly struggling to make ends meet. So the billions of dollars of cuts from the federal government under the Trump administration have far-reaching effects into American life.

So what do states do? They’re going to have to either increase their own revenue somehow or make massive cuts to the kinds of things that the government exists for. At the local level, libraries faced with that sometimes have to cut back hours, cut back programming that they sometimes do, maybe they cut back the amount of purchases they make for materials, God forbid there’s laying off people or even closing.

I think it shows respect as individuals and human beings to say, ‘You’re a thinking person. This is going to challenge you.’

— Daniel Montgomery

One of the things here in Illinois that was affected by IMLS cuts was interlibrary loan service. The federal program ran the interlibrary loan services in the bunch of communities, which is how if you’re in a rural community, you can get material that might not exist in your local library but are in a neighboring county or a neighboring jurisdiction. So those effects really do hit home with the public.

You were an English teacher for a long time. Did you ever get challenges from parents who thought the books you taught were inappropriate?

During my career, the only one I can recall a parent challenging was the Bible. In my school district, we taught parts of the Bible just as literature and sort of cultural background. You’re not teaching religion, you’re doing history and literature of a sacred text. We looked at other sacred texts from other traditions, too.

I had a parent who was convinced that if you had kids read anything from the Bible at all, it was trying to proselytize and have them become Christians, I guess. But our district had a really good, strong challenged materials policy that parents had to follow.

What were your favorite books to teach?

I taught a huge array of students, from freshmen who were reading well below grade level to senior AP. With the freshmen, there’s no book in the world that’s more gripping than “Of Mice and Men.” It didn’t matter who the kids were or what their reading level was, that was a book you could teach and the kids loved it. It’s a very short book, but it’s powerful. It raises all sorts of interesting questions. Also a book that has been banned at various times where people tried to ban it in history, just about every book in our list. The diary of Anne Frank was very moving and powerful.

I love teaching Shakespeare. Macbeth, usually we teach that with seniors, and that really carries so much weight that is really fun to teach.

I love teaching “Billy Budd,” the Herman Melville story kind of novella. That was something that most kids had never had an exposure to but were really taken by, especially older readers, just because of the ethical problems that presents.

School children want to be challenged. They’re brilliant. I always found that rigorous and challenging material, you have to scaffold it and support them as readers, but the kids can read the classics. They can read much simpler things and still get a lot out of it.

When you have school library book challenges, it seems what people are saying is that these students can’t handle challenging material or they can’t handle something even like, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which is frequently on most-banned lists. They’re underestimating kids in that way.

There’s a lot of great evidence, stories and education writers writing about the experience of teaching kids — some of whom come from really tough backgrounds, tough urban settings, a lot of poverty — really challenging materials, down to the Greek and Roman classics.

It’s my experience that kids love to be challenged. I think it shows respect as individuals and human beings to say, ‘You’re a thinking person. This is going to challenge you.’ But that’s what education is. It’s change, and it’s challenge.

I found my students always completely responded to that, and they felt more respect for you as a teacher because they felt in the end you treated them more like a grown-up.

I remember being in high school and hanging out with some other girls who I knew had very tough home lives, and this one girl really loved the Ellen Hopkins books like “Crank,” which are based on her daughter’s struggle with addiction. I think she probably just felt seen by having access to a book about that experience.

There’s a really great novel called “Freshwater Road” by Denise Nicholas, who’s known much better as an actress, but she wrote a really good book about this young African American woman who [joins] Freedom Summer in 1964, leaves her freshman year from the University of Michigan.

I would teach that junior year, so while the kids are studying the Civil Rights Era and Freedom Rides and things like that, they read this fictional book, and what’s great about it is that the protagonist is a 19-year-old woman of color. I rarely had a book that the girls in my classes attached to better than that.

That was a great read because it challenged them, it opened their eyes about what was going on in the South in the ’60s and what life for a very strong-willed, independent young Black woman would be in that setting. So it was really fun because those are such great experiences to go through with young people.

That’s the implicit argument for libraries: That a young person could walk into a library not knowing what they want to read or what would captivate them. And a brilliant librarian’s going to say, ‘What are you interested in? Have you ever heard of this book?’ I think anyone who’s a reader has had the experience of someone recommending or giving you a book you didn’t know anything about. You read it and you feel like it changes your life or how you look at the world.

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