Some Marylanders may know that the state ranks near the top when it comes to education on some very desirable metrics — Maryland students ranked seventh in the nation in 2023 on Advanced Placement exams, and a report from WalletHub in August found Maryland has the third-best school system in the country. Last week, however, Maryland landed high on a list that may come as a surprise to some, considering the state’s solid-blue political tilt.

Maryland schools ranked in the top 10 in the country for the most book bans in the 2023-2024 school year, tying with South Carolina for ninth place, according to a Friday report from PEN America, which is tracking instances of book bans in public schools nationwide. Maryland’s high ranking, after not recording a single book ban last year, is almost entirely attributable to the Carroll County School District, which the report found accounted for 59 out of the 64 books banned in Maryland.

The Carroll County School District has gone on a book-banning spree since the county’s board of education in January unanimously voted to ban all library books and readings that feature “sexually explicit” content. Kit Hart, chair of Carroll County Moms for Liberty, the conservative group responsible for most of the requests to pull books, has defended the bans as commonsense removal of content that simply doesn’t belong in schools, books that depict “graphic sex or rape through visuals and or textual descriptions.”

That may sound reasonable, but as the Maryland State Board of Education noted in a warning to the district in August, the school board’s broad definition of “sexually explicit” could problematically be applied to any number of books, from works of William Shakespeare to biology textbooks. And while the books that have been removed from shelves may contain sexual content, some are also serious works of literature that have long been on reading curricula, from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” to Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

What broad criteria for removal allow for is selective challenges to books that are ideologically opposed by groups like Moms for Liberty, and for political and social controversies to be litigated at the local school board level. We should treat Maryland’s place on PEN America’s list, and the flood of Republican and Democratic spending on Maryland’s “nonpartisan” school board races, as a wake-up call: The culture wars have reached our school boards, and Maryland’s students won’t be any better off for it.