My award for championing science and freethought in 2011 (even though we’re not yet at the mid-point of the year) goes to Zack Kopplin, a Baton Rouge high school senior who has been leading the fight in Louisiana for the repeal of a law that encourages schools to “teach the controversy” over evolution.

My booby prize for sheer spinelessness goes to the 60 percent of American high school biology teachers who, according to a survey published earlier this year, take a neutral stance on evolution in their classrooms.

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Yes, neutral. Does the sun revolve around the earth or the earth around the sun? I teach all sides and you students can just decide for yourselves.

The findings of the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers are genuinely dismaying. Only 28 percent of public high school biology instructors consistently use lesson plans, recommended by scientific organizations, that present evolution as the unifying theme linking different areas of biology. About 13 percent of teachers explicitly teach creationism or intelligent design in defiance of federal court decisions. The other 60 percent—the spineless majority—try to avoid controversy, often by substituting a phrase like “changes over time” for the taboo E-word.

Analyzing the findings in Science magazine, Penn State University political science professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer cited three strategies used by what they call the “cautious” majority of teachers. Some teach evolution as if it applies only to molecular biology and therefore avoid the whole question of whether species give rise to other species. Others—especially in school districts with many religious fundamentalists—tell students that although they need to understand evolution to pass standardized tests, they don’t have to “believe” in it. Still other teachers expose students to a wide variety of religious and nonreligious positions on evolution and tell them to make up their own minds.

The last strategy is explicitly endorsed by the Louisiana law, which encourages teachers to bring “supplementary” materials into biology classrooms. The 17-year-old Kopplin mobilized 40 Nobel Prize-winning scientists to sign a letter demanding that the Louisiana State Legislature repeal the law. Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal—who graduated from Brown University with a double major in biology and public policy—opposes repeal.

As the U Penn political scientists note, more high school students take biology than any other science course. For about 25 percent, biology will be their only secondary school science class. That the majority of biology teachers fudge the scientific truth in the only science class their students may ever take is nothing less than an educational scandal.

Furthermore, the obfuscation of evolution is not limited to those states, mainly in the South, with laws shaped by religious fundamentalism. Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, said studies in his state have shown that at least 25 percent of high school teachers explicitly endorse creationism in the classroom.

Plutzer, co-author of the article in Science, speculates that the “cautious” 60 percent “represent a group of educators who, if they were better trained in science and general and in evolution in particular, would be more confident in their ability to explain controversial topics to their students, to parents, and to school board members.”

Moore, however, suggests that ideology, not lack of education, is the problem. “They (the creationists) already know what evolution is,” he told the New York Times. “They were biology majors or former biology students. They just reject what we told them…There’s no other field where teachers reject the foundations of their science like they do in biology.”

Moore is right. The wishy-washy teachers, like the governor of Louisiana, are not uneducated. Some of them simply refuse to accept settled science because of their religious beliefs. Others undoubtedly know better but are worried about their jobs and standing in the community in areas with a large fundamentalist presence. Teachers in the latter group may certainly be tormented by their failure to fulfill their educational mission. They must have chosen to study biology in college because they cared about the subject but they are not passing on the knowledge they possess.

It would be wrong to place the blame solely on these teachers, because no other group of educators in the developed world has to contend with superiors who demand deference to anti-scientific fundamentalist religion. Yet they cannot be absolved of responsibility. In a sense, they are more culpable than teachers who genuinely believe in creationism. If they weren’t going to teach real biology, they shouldn’t have become biology teachers.

Zack Kopplin is young and feisty. “The single most important reason why I took on this repeal was jobs,” he told The Washington Post. “This law makes I harder for Louisiana students to get cutting-edge science-based jobs after we graduate, because companies like Baton Rouge’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center are not going to trust our science education with this law on the books.”

He is right, of course. It’s just that the legislators who want to sneak creationism in by the back door are motivated not by any concern for jobs or the education of Louisiana students but by their anti-scientific form of religion. The secular movement desperately needs young, energetic warriors for reason like Kopplin. Our nation’s biology teachers, it seems, are too tired and too intimidated to stand up for science and reason themselves.