I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say I was raised in a public school.

My mother teaches elementary school in the same suburban Boston town where we live. I spent countless hours of my toddlerhood visiting her 1st grade classroom, messing up her students’ games during indoor recess and whining about how I wasn’t allowed to watch Arthur on the small TV stuffed in the corner of the room. Even our living room turned into a classroom during my kindergarten years, where she painstakingly taught her own four children to “sound it out” and drilled multiplication tables into our heads so often I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, trying to remember what 6 x 7 equals.

My mother also teaches at what is called a Title I school, meaning the school gets extra funding and a program of free-or-reduced-priced lunches, because most of her students live in low-income households. Some of them are homeless. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, wants to gut their funding and instead use our tax dollars to fund school vouchers, making taxpayers pay to send other people’s children to religious and charter schools in different districts.

Devos has never attended, sent her children to, or probably even set foot in a public school. She has been quoted calling them “a dead end”. She’s never been a teacher or taken out a student loan in her life. She’s a conservative millionaire who is dangerously close to being in charge of the fifty million, four hundred thousand American children who attend public school.

So I want to talk to her, and to all her supporters, about what it was like to go to a “Dead End” public school. Which I did, proudly, from kindergarten to twelfth grade.

Despite being in a town that was 80% Irish-Catholic, in kindergarten we made Latkes and learned about Hanukkah and Yom Kippur. In middle school my locker was next to a girl who had fled Egypt with her family due to religious persecution. One of the town's public schools accepted her into their English as a Second Language program. You didn’t have to say the Pledge of Allegiance if you didn’t want to. You were allowed to excuse yourself from class at anytime to pray to Mecca.

I have ADHD and some muddled form of dyscalculia. School was really, really hard for me, and still can be. I had teachers who caught it. I had teachers who stayed after school to go over my math tests with me for hours. I had teachers who stayed after school, for free, to lead student drama, an activity that, had I not had access to, I may not have made it seventeen years old.

At my graduation I sat side-by-side with kids that went on to Harvard, the U.S. Navy, cosmetology school, MIT, UMass Lowell, landscaping companies, Europe, and everywhere in between.

Wow, those sure sound like dead ends to me.

So let’s not pretend the problem is public schools. The problem is that when people like Betsy DeVos think of public schools, they picture a Step Up movie. To them, public school is synonymous with gangbangers and drug addicts and people who are not Christian and not white.

Just like the rest of the new administration, DeVos is angling to marginalize POC (26 million of whom attend public school as opposed to the 25 million white kids who do), and that schools in primarily POC neighborhoods receive less money through taxes and federal funding due to a long, long history of racial discrimination and cyclical poverty in this country. But that’s an article for another day.

A friend of mine, who is black and Protestant, told me she and many other non-Catholic students in her town attended a Catholic school because “the public schools had no money. It was the best option.” DeVos wants to make charter schools and voucher programs the only option.

Not everyone was lucky enough to go to a public school like mine, that, for the most part, had the materials and attentive teachers we needed. We still experienced overcrowding and too much of an emphasis to teach to the test rather than to the subject, because higher test scores get the school more funding (the latter of which has caused my mother to scream into a pillow countless times) These are pressing and legitimate problems of bureaucracy that public schools face today.

But by shifting all funding from places that need it, like my mother’s school, like half the public schools in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, DeVos is not going to fix these problems. She’s just going to deprive even more people of secular, local, and quality education.