When Zack Kopplin was six years old, his younger sister, Lila, came bounding down their Baton Rouge stairs. Joining her family at the table, she shared her news.
Photo courtesy of Andrea Neighbours
Zack Kopplin took an early interest in both the natural and the prehistoric world.
Photo courtesy of Andrea Neighbours
His childhood fascination with dinosaurs and fossils helped spur his current opposition to publicly funded creationism.
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"I know where babies come from!" she exclaimed brightly. "God makes the babies up in heaven and brings them down to mommies and daddies."
Zack, who'd just finished reading a children's biography of Charles Darwin, leapt from his chair, bursting to Lila's side of the table. "That is not right!" he shouted. "That is not right, Lila! Babies don't come from God — they come from monkeys!"
"No, God!"
"Monkeys!"
"God!"
"Monkeys!"
And on it went, neither child allowing any ground.
Nearly a dozen years on, and with a more finely tuned understanding of Darwin's theories, Kopplin learned that the Louisiana State Legislature would be presenting something similar to Lila's argument. It was late 2010, and the state was holding a public hearing on potentially scrapping the textbooks pipelined for Louisiana students and replacing them with ones including creationism.
To be sure, creationism was already legal in Louisiana. Kopplin — who had worked on a senior project focusing on the Louisiana Science Education Act, a misnomer that had legalized the study of creationism — was hoping to prevent it from entering public textbooks. "This was just to stem the bleeding," he says.
Kopplin settled into his seat, a 12-person panel, including the pair of legislators who'd sponsored the LSEA, semicircling over him. He placed his papers in front of him. Kopplin, who'd long preferred burying his head in books and news feeds to making direct eye contact, looked up. He found the legislators' faces.
"Look, I know we have a science problem," he began. "And some will say the LSEA requires you to do this, because that's the message pushed. Some will say we need different textbooks because we're confused about the [evolution] controversy. But that's not true."
He paused. The two legislators, the two who'd injected religion directly, deeply, into the education of public school students, shuffled uncomfortably and watched. Kopplin continued.
"And frankly, the LSEA is an unconstitutional creationism law. And it needs to be repealed."
Kopplin, shoving the butterflies aside, had accosted a pair of state legislators about a bill violating the Establishment Clause. He breathed. He'd begun.
Three years, countless speeches and 78 Nobel laureate signatures later, Kopplin, now 19 and a student at Rice University, has taken his fight to Houston, to Texas. And if our state's legislators don't yet know his name — if they haven't seen him all over cable news or haven't read his writings on famed evolutionist Richard Dawkins's Web site — they soon will.
Because Texas, over the course of this next legislative session, will likely be deciding on a form of voucher funding for its public school students. And unlike Louisiana, this state still has an opportunity to forgo sending public funds to creationist academies.
And Kopplin, who has thrown all his energies into his research, has begun touring both the state and the nation to make sure that his new home does not become like his old.
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"This is the civil rights issue of our time," Republican state Senator Dan Patrick tells me in early February. Patrick, bedecked in a canary scarf symbolizing his support of something he's taken to calling "school choice," is sitting in an emptying gymnasium. He's just finished pacing a stage, running the numbers and the narratives of the students who'd escaped the crumbling rings of public education.
He's calling for an overhaul of the charter system and noting, time and again, how much bipartisan support he's received. Indeed, Representative Gene Wu says Patrick is one of the few Republicans who are not simply pushing for an increase in charter allotment, but also acknowledge that the $5.4 billion hacked from the public education coffers in 2011 was indeed a cut, rather than the slashed surplus that Governor Rick Perry posits.
Which is big, in a sense. Because Patrick, as the new head of the Senate Education Committee, has the power — the leverage, the position — to cajole Perry into reinstating the defunct funding. Plus, even if the $5.4 billion were reinstated, public funding would still be only at 2011 levels.
But Patrick won't do that. Perry wants something else, as does Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst.
And while the senator continues to sit there, bouncing numbers on the merits and the waitlists and the values of charters — 100,000 students on standby, 300,000 students failing — he alludes to the plan that is still gestating.
He won't call his proposal "vouchers." That name, non grata, has been shelved. "You bring up vouchers, and you start to see temperaments get a little warmer and heart rates quicken a little bit," says Dax Gonzalez, communications manager with the Texas Association of School Boards.
Indeed, what Patrick is planning — again, no formal language has yet gone up, so we have only sound bites and white papers — aren't vouchers, technically. Rather, what he says he wants is something he calls a Business Tax Scholarship.
There is, however, more than a mere semantic difference between vouchers and these seemingly anodyne scholarships. Instead of simply directing public education funds toward a voucher system, Patrick's plan would allow the right-leaning Legislature to funnel part of businesses' current franchise tax into some form of voucher pool. In return for their scholastic generosity, the businesses would receive attendant tax credits — swiping a break for a tax foregone.
