It's an intriguing concept. "These aren't public dollars," Patrick says reassuringly. And he is — semantically, technically — correct. The monies never enter the state's treasury. They never touch government hands.
But that's little more than wordplay, lawyerly smoke obscuring the fact that funds headed to public coffers have instead been redirected from private hands toward private hands.
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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"What he's proposing is a racket," says Dan Quinn, communications director with Texas Freedom Network. "It's kind of like money laundering. Instead of the state providing the funds directly, Patrick can get businesses to do it. It's a racket."
And it's not simply about funds forgotten and accountability ignored. After Georgia began a widespread and wholly similar system in 2008, a New York Times investigation revealed large-scale corruption trammeling these educational transactions: Private schools building athletic empires. Boards aiding employees and relatives rather than those in need. Schools taking the public scholarships to buttress antigay policies.
More worrying to many, though, was the spike in state-funded creationism. Entirely ignoring any concept of church-state separation, Georgia allowed businesses to subsidize public students now receiving educations on the origins of Eden, the racial legacy of Noah and the merits of Levitical homophobia. Some of the economics classes in those high schools receiving "scholarships" began teaching that the Antichrist "will one day control what is bought and sold." And a handful, bizarrely, also attributed Noah's flood to the current store of petroleum and shale reserves found near the South's oil-heavy states.
Georgia, however, is but one state to which Patrick is looking for guidance. While he seems set on the concept of scholarships, another state, Louisiana, has recently implemented a voucher system unparalleled in both scope and strife.
Per Kopplin's research, Louisiana's encounters with creationism have been even starker and more egregious: self-proclaimed prophets declaiming their holiness; schools learning of the friendships between Adam, Eve and iguanodons; students shoveled in front of television sets showing little more than Bible-based videos for hours.
All of these, funded directly by the state's new voucher program while the public school system misses out on the millions now sent toward these creationist academies.
"Louisiana [has had] almost the destruction of traditional public schools in that state," says Linda Bridges, president of the Texas Chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. "Louisiana is someplace we don't want to go."
Despite the fact that Louisiana's system was recently declared unconstitutional by a state district judge, those modeling potential legislation in Texas have singled out both Georgia and Louisiana as having systems worth implementing here.
"If we created any kind of school choice at the state level, then we'd probably instantaneously become the largest school choice program in the country," says James Golsan, the leading educational analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the pre-eminent voucher lobbying organization in the state. "And if it's exclusively private reform, or if it's comprehensive [reform] like Louisiana, that's all going to get hammered out in the legislative process."
When asked what system he'd most like to see Texas implement, Golsan is concise: "I think there's enough momentum to see some reforms in this session," he says. "[And] comprehensive reform is the ultimate goal."
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As a child, Kopplin was shy. Painfully, paralyzingly shy. His grandfather would stare at him, admonishing him: "Look me in the eye!" And Kopplin would nod, take his eyes from his grandfather's gaze and turn them down, watching his shoes.
"My dad was always a little disappointed in Zack," Andrea Neighbours, his mother, said. "My dad was always a tough guy. He just couldn't understand."
But that shyness didn't prevent a young Kopplin from developing an early moral compass. According to his mother — and as evidenced by his convictions on (and slight misreadings of) Darwin — Kopplin always knew what was right. He always followed the facts.
"When he was younger, he was more of a black-and-white thinker," his mother recalls. "There's right and wrong, and it made him a very moral kid. He'd say that this is right and that facts are right when you have evidence."
Zack was a voracious reader. His grandmother consistently boxed books to send him, and his literary pursuit was supported by a mother who'd written a pair of novels herself.
But his time and his interests weren't purely page-bound. To Zack, there were few creatures more intriguing than the terrible lizards that once roamed the bayous and the byways nearby, and he took an early interest in the lives and demise of dinosaurs. He pinpointed the museums nearby — in Houston, in Dallas — and his family visited them whenever his father Andy's job would allow.
Soon his grandmother's books were joined by brittle, calcified bones, bundled alongside pre-Columbian artifacts and ancient horse teeth.
Meanwhile, Andy Kopplin served as chief of staff for both Louisiana's Republican Governor Mike Foster, elected in 1995, and Foster's Democratic successor, Kathleen Blanco, elected in 2003. The latter contest struck a portentous note, beginning the end of a friendship between the Kopplins and the family of the current governor, Bobby Jindal, whom Blanco had defeated.
Discussions on policy poured through Kopplin's house, and he paired his interests in fossilized records with a pursuit of current affairs. Coming of age during the George W. Bush years — and taking a marked interest in monitoring the Arab Spring — lent Kopplin a particular political bent.
