Zack Kopplin is an American science education activist.  While he was a high school student at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, the Louisiana legislature passed the Louisiana Science Education Act  signed by Governor Bobby Jindal.  Zack Kopplin, who is now a history major at Rice University was very surprised that Governor Jindal signed this anti-science act, especially since Jindal has a degree in biology, and was a Rhodes Scholar.  In his senior project, Kopplin initiated a campaign to repeal the Louisiana Act by recruiting Professor Barbara Forest, a philosophy professor who had testified in the 2005 Dover intelligent design/creationism case in Pennsylvania.  He also teamed with Louisiana State Senator Karen Carter Peterson to write bills to repeal the act.  Seventy-eight Nobel Laureates have also signed on to support Zack Kopplin.  The AAAS and 70,000 people have signed his change.org petition.

When Kopplin answered Moyers’ question, “What was it about the Louisiana Science Education Act that you didn’t like?, here is what Kopplin said:

Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our public school biology classrooms to quote, “critique controversial theories,” like evolution and climate change. Now, evolution and climate change aren’t scientifically controversial, but they are controversial to Louisiana legislators. And basically, everyone who looked at this law knew it was just a backdoor to sneak creationism into public school science classes.

These anti-science bills (believe or not, called “academic freedom bills) that passed in Louisiana (2008), and Tennessee (2012) disguise their intent of teaching creationism and intelligent design using clever and slick language that they are coming to the rescue of science teachers by passing a law that protects teachers’ academic freedom to present lessons questioning and critiquing scientific theories being studied including but not limited to evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning. Kind of a poor “Trojan horse” scenario, don’t you think? Where is the theory of gravity, plate tectonics, and atomic theory on their to do list?  The first of such bills appeared in Alabama in 2004.

The bills passed in Louisiana and Tennessee were written by the Discovery Institute, a creation science and intelligent design organization.

The latest iteration of the “academic freedom bills” is the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act. The evidence is that this bill was created by the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, an organization that “works” with  politicians to write bills that are taken back to the respective state legislatures.  The Environmental Literacy Improvement Act is the brainchild of ALEC.  It uses the same kind of language that is used in the Discovery Institute bill designed to undermine the teaching of evolution and climate change, among other topics.  These bills tell teachers what they cannot do when they teach “controversial” topics such as evolution, the big bang, or climate change.  Teachers must help students analyze and review “the strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories.”  The bill is designed to enable the “creep” of creationism and denial into the science.

Evolution and climate change research have become partners in crime over the past decade.  What we have is a synthesis of religious dogma and corporate self interests (especially oil companies) that has resulted in efforts by organizations such as the Discovery Institute and ALEC to push their anti-science bills onto every state legislature that will listen to them.  They are doing quite well.  According to Glen Branch from the National Center for Science Education, in 2013, nine anti-science bills were introduced, five mention global warming: Colorado’s House Bill 1213, Kansas’s House Bill 2306, Montana’s House Bill 1213, and Oklahoma’s House Bill 1674, in addition to Arizona’s SB 1213.  We might consider these bills to be “strengths and weaknesses” bills because they require teachers to be sure to include a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, climate change, sometime cloning, and other topics, but never is gravity on the list.

Zack Kopplin’s activism is not limited to anti-science legislation.  He has discovered that many charter schools that are receiving millions in federal and state funding are teaching creation and intelligent design and denigrating the enterprise of science. Now he is raising cane about school vouchers.  In his interview with Bill Moyers, Kopplin said this about school vouchers:

I didn’t initially really care about school vouchers because I was fundamentally a science advocate. And I was worried about evolution. And then last summer I got, a friend sent me an article by Alternet that had exposed a school in Louisiana in this voucher program that was apparently using curriculum that taught the Loch Ness Monster disproved evolution, and the Loch Ness Monster was real.

And so it caught my attention. And I said, “Well, let me look into this more.” And so I pulled a list of the voucher schools off our department of education’s website and just started going through them. And I’d look up a school and look up its website. And I’d go find a school that said, “Scientists are sinful men.” And we are—

A bit later in the interview he revealed further evidence that many voucher schools are teaching creationism. He said this:

And recently we, I exposed with MSNBC that over 300 schools in voucher programs in nine states and Washington DC are teaching creationism. We have schools that call evolution the way of the heathen. And so it’s become pretty clear if you create a voucher program, you’re just going to be funding creationism through the back door.

What do think about Zack Kopplin’s science education activism?