Texas school fires teacher for assigning illustrated Anne Frank book: report

A Texas middle school has fired one of its teachers for assigning a graphic novel adaptation of "The Diary of Anne Frank," according to a report.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the Hamshire-Fannett Independent School District sent the unnamed teacher home last week after she read a portion of Frank's diary where she "wrote about male and female genitalia" to her eighth-grade reading class.

The graphic novel adaptation of Frank's diary kept her original text in full, although the Chronicle notes that "previous versions of Frank's diary omitted sections in which she wrote about sexuality."

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Local news station KFDM, which originally reported the story, obtained a statement from the school claiming that the illustrated version of Frank's diary had not been approved for teaching, although the station found that "it was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year."

The diary of Frank, a German-born Jewish girl who was killed by Nazis at the age of 15, has been taught to middle school children for decades.

The firing of a teacher for assigning the illustrated version of Frank's diary is just the latest battle in right-wing culture wars that have seen books of all kinds banned from school libraries and teachers reprimanded or fired for teaching purportedly controversial texts.