Conservative activist Christopher Rufo took a victory lap Thursday after New York Magazine corrected a quote in an article attacking Rufo by Jonathan Chait.
“Winning: New York Magazine’s @jonathanchait fabricated a quotation in an attempt to smear me, but I caught him red-handed and his editors had to retract the false statement and issue a correction,” Rufo tweeted. “Very embarrassing for him.”
Chait admitted the quote in his article had to be changed but claimed that the two quotes “said virtually the same thing.”
The fake quote read, “In order to achieve universal school choice, it’s necessary to create an atmosphere of universal public-school distrust.”
The real quote said, “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”
These statements may appear to be close in meaning, but they say two very different things. As one of the top comments in Chait’s timeline notes, “One calls for creating mistrust, the other is assuming everyone already mistrusts them.”
That is exactly right. And you can see that more clearly when Rufo’s correct quote is put into full context. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust. I think that the public schools have done a remarkable job at doing just that, specifically, the public school teachers unions. They shut down the schools for more than a year.”
And if you look at the polling, confidence in public schools has been decreasing for decades, long before Rufo became an activist. According to Gallup, in 1973, 61% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats had confidence in public schools. By 2000, those numbers had fallen to 33% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats.
The COVID lockdowns, in particular, have done even more damage to trust in public schools, at least among Republicans. In 2019, just 28% of Republicans had confidence in public schools. Today, that number has fallen to 14%. Meanwhile, Democrats’ confidence in public schools has risen through COVID from 30% in 2019 to 43% today.
Separately, Pew has found that the vast majority of people, 62%, believe that the government gave “too little priority” to “meeting the educational needs of K-12 students.”
School choice has long been a goal of the conservative movement, long before Rufo was born. But as Gallup’s polling clearly shows, Rufo did not create the public’s distrust in public schools. Public schools did that on their own. And the COVID shutdowns only made that crisis of confidence worse.
