Joyce Vance is a veteran federal prosecutor; she was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern district of Alabama from 2009-2017. She writes a blog called “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance.” She usually writes about the law, the justice system, and Trump’s efforts to avoid accountability for his misdeeds. But in this post, she addresses the root cause of his appeal: low-information voters who are hoodwinked by his lies and believe he will fight for them. Ha. Not funny.
She writes:
It’s no wonder that Project 2025 calls for putting an end to the Department of Education. Trump’s electoral success depended on so-called low-information voters, members of the electorate who couldn’t or didn’t distinguish between the tough talk and tough guy image the candidate portrayed and the reality of the policies that come with his win. That’s often true for MAGA candidates, who are inexplicably able to attract the voters who are harmed by the policies they subsequently pass, as with tax cuts for the extremely wealthy and the working-class voters who didn’t benefit from them, but made them possible.
The Washington Post had this story today about the hopes of low-income voters who went for Trump in 2024, like a single mom who said she sometimes has to choose between buying toilet paper and milk and told reporters, “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich … I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” So far, that’s not looking good.
This very predictable reporting about voters suffering from buyers’ remorse is emerging even before Trump takes office. These people hope he won’t do exactly what he said he would during the campaign and has been focused on during his transition with programs like the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s DOGE—cut government spending that they depend on. Whether it’s low-income people, mixed-status immigrant families, people who rely on Social Security, or parents with immune-compromised kids who rely on immunized classrooms, people voted against their own self-interest and are now facing that reality.
There are no do-overs in presidential elections. Successful disinformation campaigns or campaigns where image trumps consequences have lasting effects.
But spin, or disinformation—however you want to characterize it—designed to redirect voters away from focusing on bad facts about candidates can work, and this past election proved it. This T-shirt ad that the algorithm fed me earlier this week is an example of how Trump’s criminal conviction was sold to voters: the mythical outlaw, not the corrupt criminal. It’s hard to believe Americans fell for that, but they did, giving Trump a pass and letting him cultivate an image that was one step further out there than Sarah Palin’s maverick.
Voters who lack the backbone of a solid education in civics can be manipulated. That takes us to Trump’s plans for the Department of Education.
Stepping on education and staunching the flow of information is a key goal for any authoritarian. Remember when Trump told an evangelical group during the campaign that if they voted in 2024 it would be the last time they had to vote? That’s something that Americans, hopefully, will not fall for, because the 2026 midterms will be key. If guardrails are going to be rebuilt, that’s where an important part of it will happen. And while we’re all burned out from the last election, this next one will matter; we will need to reengage, because a big Democratic win could staunch the bleeding from unfettered acquiescence by the legislative branch to Trump, who currently commands majorities in both chambers. That means the provision of accurate information and accurate analysis of that information to voters who will put it to use is important. But what does that look like in a country that voted for Trump?
One thing that is clear from the ease with which Trump seems to have stripped so many voters of their common sense is the need to restore civics education in this country. That’s a long-term plan and a big topic that we need to take on over time, but it’s not too early for us to begin to think about what we can do in the coming year ahead of the midterms. For one thing, if it’s right for you, even if it’s a stretch, consider running or seeking appointment to a school board. Republicans got the jump on Democrats in this arena. It’s time to catch up. Or, if that’s not in your lane, make the time to show up at school board meetings and demand civics education in our schools. Progress in this area will take time, but we can all set a good example and encourage people around us to do a better job of understanding what matters in government. Ironically, if 2017 is any indication, people caught off guard (although who knows how) by some of the worst excesses Trump is likely to engage in will be ready to be better informed and reengage in democracy. Capturing that moment will be important.
One of the goals of Project 2025 is terminating the Department of Education. There is growing Republican support for that plan at the state level by leaders who want to restore state control (much like conservatives sought restoration of abortion policy to the hands of red state officials in Dobbs). Enter Trump’s nominee to head the Department, Linda McMahon, who ran the Small Business Administration (SBA) for him from 2017 to 2019.
Trump’s appointment of the professional wrestling magnate has drawn little comment as the media has focused on Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and others. Suffice it to say she does not appear to possess much of a background in public education. She was on the Connecticut Board of Education for one year, but there has been reporting she received that appointment after lying about having a degree in education. When that report came to light while McMahon was running, unsuccessfully, for a Connecticut Senate seat, she said that “she mistakenly thought her degree was in education because she did a semester of student teaching, and that she had written to the governor’s office the previous year to correct the error after another newspaper noticed the mistake.” (I, too, did some student teaching in college, but I was always clear my degree was in political science and international relations.)
McMahon is a longtime Trump ally and financial backer, apparently key qualifications for the job. After two years at the SBA, she stepped aside to run Trump’s America First Action PAC. Other qualifications: Yahoo News reported that “Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary was once pile-driven by a 7ft wrestler and feigned being drugged unconscious while her husband cheated on her.” Yahoo went on to recount that “Mr. Trump served as a sponsor and host for WWE events in Atlantic City in the late 1980s and years later appeared in the ring himself, when he took a razor to the head of Ms. McMahon’s scandal-ridden husband, Vince, as the wrestling boss wailed. In 2013, WWE inducted Mr. Trump into its hall of fame.”
The National Education Association ran an editorial opposing McMahon’s confirmation. They called her “unqualified” and wrote that she “spent years pushing policies that would defund and destroy public schools.” That sounds like a good fit if your agenda involves destroying the Department of Education. Start at the top.
NEA President Becky Pringle said, “McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools.”
So while we begin to think about ways to repair democracy, medium-term goals like winning midterm elections, and long-term goals like restoring civics education, spare a moment for some short-term plans: write to your senators about McMahon’s nomination. It’s flying largely under the radar screen, and it should not be. Do not obey in advance, and do not make it easy for Trump to destroy democratic institutions like the Department of Education with the complicity of your state and federal elected officials. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to public education. We have to insist that free, publicly funded, high-quality education is available to every child. Our engagement as citizens is everything. Let’s get to work.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
Open the link to see the illustrations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Anyone who believes that anyone in either party will fight for them is a low information voter.
Or else extremely wealthy and privileged, in which case they are correct because both parties do fight for them.
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How sad to go through life with such a sour outlook.
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All in validation of H L Mencken’s quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
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I went to Huntsville, AL to lead a school in the effort to be IB/PYP certified. As we introduced the curriculum, we developed units that focused on community. For example, our first graders investigated the components of our community by designing a town of their own. It began with a walking field trip through the neighborhood that included various businesses in a town square. The students then made such things as firehouses, grocery stores, and houses that they arranged in the school foyer as a town. Parents and community leaders came to look at the display and engage with the students about what they had created.
When I hear a cry for civics education I have mixed feelings. When I think about my own civics class in 9th grade I recall learning about government because I was motivated to do well in school. I’m not sure my classmates with different priorities became enamored with how a democratic government works. Too many saw little connection to their lives.
I do believe that we need to infuse public education with the requirements for democratic governance, but if we do this through a typical application of curriculum then our intention to better inform our citizens will be lost. As I grew up in the 1960’s such activities as recess, play, and pick up games taught me much about community and working with others. Our focus on tests and college prep curricula have moved us away from the practical application of human interaction to a theoretical construct that is only applied to our meritocratic myth.
Yes, we need civics education like we need opportunities to build and create things. Especially for young children. For this practice to have effect, we need to infuse meaningful personal experience with student interaction that emphasizes the individual role in democracy. Simply teaching about the three branches of government will not develop a more informed and practical citizenry.
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The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.
The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.
The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things. Jill LePore/The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died
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Thanks for this interesting post. The divisive rhetoric from the right makes meaningful debate a challenge. It is difficult to debate with fanatics. Trump and the GOP are finding a rift within their party over H1B visas. Changing an opinion in a debate requires self-reflection and compromise which right wing extremists are loathe to do.
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Yes! We need an ACTIVE civics education. Not just reading about democracy, but practicing it. Debate and elections are at the heart of civics education in a republic or democracy. For example, when I attended jr. high school, a whole school was turned into a political convention–with every student a delegate.
When I taught high school, I had a red-white-and-blue ballot box in my room and we voted, secret ballot, on something or other several times a grading period. We elected a Room Representative, voted “mock” for local, state, and national leaders, etc.
I hope readers of this blog don’t mind me saying again: We learn by doing. We wouldn’t dream of fielding a football team that had just read about football–or been lectured about it. We learn democracy by doing democracy.
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Jack,
You must have been a wonderful teacher!
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The leadership of the Democratic Party needs a civics education along with marketing techniques that work.
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The orange creep doesn’t need to abolish the Department of Education to stop civics education. That’s already happened. Utah, for example, has so many testing and tech requirements that students get NO social studies education until 8th grade. The state has been cutting social studies requirements to the point where some districts in Utah combine all of geography and all of world history into a one Semester class. Yes, Utah requires students pass the citizenship test to graduate, but the only civics education most Utah students get is a 1-semester government class as seniors, much of which is spent doing test after test so that students can pass the test to graduate.
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Good lord. I frankly can’t imagine that. When I was a kid [K12 1955-1966], in elemschool (1st-6th) we studied ancient/ world history, starting with Egypt/ Rome, moving gradually up through Revolutionary times [+ a lot of world geography]. In Junior High [7th-9th], we focused first on the local. In 7th gr we studied the native American tribes that settled our area, & devpts once colonial settlers moved in. We also did current events 1 day out of 5; in that time there was much to follow about independence movements in Africa. And so on up the line. In high school there were in-depth courses in World History and early American History [where we studied founders’ thinking along with philosophy of the times, and founding documents in more depth]. How UT can justify lumping all that into a few compressed courses is beyond me. Just eliminating soc stud from K-7th deprives them of basic geography and broad-brush history that gives them a foundation for further study.
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Yep. In my early years of teaching history and geography, most of my students came with a pretty solid grasp of basic facts, but in the last 10 years the number of students who can at least name the 7 continents, for example, has nosedived.
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Here’s Another Contender For Democracy Civics Resurection
Broadcast live from New York City’s Town Hall, America’s Town Meeting of the Air debuted on Thursday May 30, 1935 and only 18 of NBC’s affiliates carried it. The topic for the first show was “Which Way America: Fascism, Communism, Socialism or Democracy?”
The moderator was George V. Denny, Jr., executive director of the League for Political Education, which produced the program. Denny moderated the program from 1935 to 1952 and had a major role in choosing weekly topics. Denny and the League wanted to create a program that would replicate the Town Meetings that were held in the early days of the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Town_Meeting_of_the_Air
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Civics is still taught in our public schools!! It just isn’t taught in one isolated class called “Civics”! Forty-one states have adopted the Common Core standards that integrate civics throughout the social studies curriculum. My four grandkids attend public schools here in North Carolina. When I asked the second grader what she had learned in social studies that week she proceeded to name the three branches of government and gave a decent description of the responsibilities of each. Her older cousin had revisited that lesson I her fourth grade class when learning about our state government. The middle schoolers studied the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
What does seem to be lacking is a focus on current events. Growing up we usually watched the evening news as a family but that doesn’t seem to be common today.
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Just because it’s supposedly in the curriculum doesn’t mean it’s being taught. The elementaries around me insist that social studies is “taught during reading instruction.” But the students that come to me in 9th grade geography have very little background knowledge. That didn’t used to be the case. I do NOT blame the teachers. It is the singular focus on testing that means only math and reading are taught.
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I am a bit cynical about the call for civics education in the context of this blog post. Does it really teach, e.g., an examination of a candidate’s platform vs actions taken once in office? Yes, a thorough grounding in how our govt works, or is supposed to work, is important. But do civics classes examine cases where how it is supposed to work clashes with how it actually worked [/ works]? Would such courses study, e.g., how and when legislative branch began ceding its Constitutional authority to exec & judicial branches and discuss why? These seem to me questions studied in the pursuit of teaching critical thinking. That pursuit needs to imbue the study of literature, science, mathematics and history. In the US we have mostly been moving away from that goal, leaving little room for it via constant standardized testing/ ‘accountability’ model. Until it is pursued (rather than given faux lip service), there is no reason to imagine civics courses will be any different.
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“One of the goals of Project 2025 is terminating the Department of Education. There is growing Republican support for that plan at the state level by leaders who want to restore state control (much like conservatives sought restoration of abortion policy to the hands of red state officials in Dobbs).”
This is such a red herring. I resent it because it reflects the MAGA/ low-info Republican framing of the issue (probably defined by Fox et al). “…who want to ‘restore state control’”– as if states/ municipalities weren’t already in virtually total control. They provide 85%-93% of all K12 per-pupil funding, and exercise that % of control, too. If their legislatures vote for voucher programs, no matter how ludicrously unregulated & expansive–unless halted by a ballot issue/ voter referendum– they… have them! If their govrs have the clout to authorize just one citizen’s censure of any book they don’t want to see in school classroom or school library shelves—bingo! Book(s) removed pending lengthy community discussions (or maybe without them).
Trying to make a parallel to dumping Roe [sending abortion legislation ‘back to the states’] is absurd. The right to reproductive freedom is arguably inherent in the Constitution. Deny that/ ‘send it back to the states’ = zero protection unless state decides to legislate it in. The right to an adequate education is NOT in the Constitution. It IS however, embodied in every state’s constitution. All Dept of Ed can do is step in when a state denies students civil rights for equal protection under the law.
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Thanks, Ginny. The issue of eliminating the Department of Educatuon is a red herring. Not going to happen. It would require an act of Congress to do that, and the Republicans would need 60 votes in the Senate. They have 53. There may be Republicans who agree that this is a silly idea and vote against it.
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Here’s what I know and lived. As a continuation high school teacher one often is told, “This year you will be teaching this subject.” And one might reply, “Do we have curriculum for this subject?”
“We are working on it.”
With that said, I built one of the best( in my perspective) American Government/Civics curriculums for my students. Often with at-risk youth, they just need a “place to be” for ADA purposes. But, if I was going to do the job, I was going to instruct as I was my own student. With that said, I spent many nights and Saturdays studying to teach the kids about their rights, the Constitution, and civic duty. In the past, I posted the news articles (I had to write and make phone calls to get coverage from my local media) to show our community that the kids were learning well, in-depth, and becoming solid, educated members of our community. When I saw an opportunity to bring in an attorney (one of our city council members) to teach the kids about the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) e.g., “Charvet can the cops just stop and search you?” — I made sure they knew their rights. We, together, explored the Constitution. How did I do this? I found a great organization https://civiced.org/we-the-people and talked to them. One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was engaged with their associate from San Jose State CSU. She brought me leveled books (concepts the same, but accessible to lower readers). I got more help than I ever would from my school. I also found out that there were summer workshops I could attend, well, if the selected me. I almost didn’t apply because, “Continuation high school teacher — what a waste of time.” But, I persisted, wrote to Mike Honda, and he sponsored me. I even got to take a colleague — all paid for at Boston University for 11 full days of nothing but Constitutional Law. Yes, I could finally say, “I went to Harvard. Uh, well, took some pictures, toured and saw the law library.” But, I had access to the Harvard Law Library while I studied the Constitution. We the People brought the best to educate us. Here’s one example, James Patrick — sat right beside him and asked questions. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states-9780195309256?cc=us&lang=en& I got to walk the Freedom Trail, https://www.thefreedomtrail.org go to Boston Commons, see where the Boston Massacre happened (and the tour guides said more people have been killed trying to take pictures at the statue than in the original event), went to https://faneuilhallmarketplace.com/about/history-of-faneuil-hall plus a whole lot more (like seeing primary documents). Ironically, as I was using this curriculum along with many other resources, I was contacted by San Jose State University to attend a special event: History Teacher Award. Here I sat next to and conversed with John Carlos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carloshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carlos WOW! What moments and journeys I discovered by being vigilant, curious, and studious. You know, when I first started teaching American Government, I asked the kids, “When does the United States Constitution apply to you?” Many responded, “Uh, when I am 18.” This is not to say, “Look at me, look at me…” but rather the how civics can be done in an authentic manner so our communities can be better educated. The results were outstanding, all my 18-year-olds were registered to vote (and some became registrars as well), some started grass roots groups because their eyes were finally opened to the Constitution. We are not talking about test-taking BS, but true, action-oriented, hands-on, “learning by doing” assignments. So if a little old dude from Gilroy, CA working in a continuation high school can get an adventure of a lifetime by persistence, vigilance, and doing what is right for his students, can’t other places do the same? Oh, by the way, when I did get our school text books, they were 10 years out of date, had no mention of Roe v. Wade and some other key information was missing. “Charvet, why do you bother, you know no one cares?” It was to always stand up for what was right and my kids got the best I could give. Happy New Year!
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A Belated Happy New Year, Diane.
Below is my belated comment in response to your post about Joyce Vance on December 30th. I intended to respond that same day but circumstances did not cooperate. My response has also been posted on my blog, *Education, Hope, and the American Dream at *https://bit.ly/4gJLF5Z
I hope you will check it out.
Thanks so much. I am a great fan of your Blog, by the way.
Mel
My comment:
How Can I Possibly Do Everything My Students Need of Me in My Classroom? https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/how-can-i-possibly-do-everything-my-students-need-of-me-in-my-classroom/
Hypothesis: That the education process on which teachers and students rely in our classrooms meets the needs of neither students nor their teachers.
In a blogpost of December 30th of 2024, Diane Ravitch reposted an article from the blog[i] https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/?page_id=13#_edn1 of Joyce Vance, a veteran US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, in which she wrote about what she believes to be the root cause of Donald Trump’s appeal to American voters. That root cause, she says, is “low-information voters who are hoodwinked by his lies and believe he will fight for them. Ha. Not funny.”
This could not be truer and begs the question, “what can we do to ensure our citizens are better informed and not so easily swayed by charlatans of any kind?
The answer, of course, is provide a higher quality education to ensure our children enter adulthood with the prerequisite knowledge and skills they will need to understand the world and its people, provide for themselves and their families, abide by the rule of law, add value to society, understand the U.S. Constitution and the role of government; and participate in their own governance by making informed choices about the cogent issues of their day.
It is my assertion that despite the extraordinary and heroic efforts of teachers, the percentage of high school students that are graduating having earned C’s, D’s, and F’s, is untenable and has been so for decades.
Ironically, the standardized test scores about which public school educators and advocates complain, verify what I believe should be obvious. If a student is unable to demonstrate proficiency on chapter tests given immediately after a lesson, why should we be surprised those same students are unable to demonstrate proficiency on state exams, given in the spring, or NAEP Assessments, whenever administered.
The lesson to be garnered from these data is that standardized tests measure the efficacy of the education process in which teachers are expected to teach and students are expected to learn. The assessments do not measure the performance of teachers or the ability of students to learn. Teachers can only teach the way they are allowed to teach and students can only learn what they have an opportunity to learn.
Rather than defend themselves from the disappointing outcomes of their students on standardized tests, educators—particularly public-school educators and their advocates—should use this long record of disappointing outcomes as evidence of a need for transformational change in the way we “structure, organize, task, staff, and resource our classrooms and how we evaluate student achievement and teacher performance.”
Whenever I convince teachers to examine an education model I have designed to reinvent the education process, there response is instructive.
“. . . this won’t work in my classroom. I barely have time to do what my students need of me today, how can I possibly do everything your model expects of me?”
My response is:
“Exactly! That is the correct question.”
Teachers cannot do everything their students need of them unless they are working with and within a model/process that supports responding to the disparate needs of a diverse population of students, in an environment in which learning is the only thing that counts. Once a student has learned how to use what they have learned in life, how long it took them is inconsequential.
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