Caleb for NC

The Education Crisis We Pretend Starts in Third Grade

Everyone in Raleigh says they want to fix education.

They’ll hold press conferences. Launch task forces. Argue endlessly about test scores, curriculum fights, culture wars, and whether kids should get vouchers to leave public schools.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

By the time many children in North Carolina arrive for their first day of kindergarten, the system has already failed them.

Not in third grade.
Not after a bad teacher.
Not because of a struggling middle school.

Before school really even begins.

And once you understand that, the entire debate around public education starts to look a little dishonest.

Because we spend enormous energy arguing about what happens inside K–12 classrooms, while ignoring the reality that the most important educational years in a child’s life happen before they ever step into one.

The race starts before kindergarten
Children do not start school from the same starting line.

Some arrive already recognizing letters, understanding numbers, and speaking thousands of words.

Others arrive still trying to catch up on basic language development.

This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about exposure.

Decades of research show that the years between birth and age five shape cognitive development, literacy, and long-term educational outcomes more than almost anything that happens later in school.

By the time teachers meet a child in kindergarten, many of the building blocks of learning — language, attention, emotional regulation — are already forming.

Which means the achievement gap teachers are asked to close in third grade often began years earlier.

North Carolina actually built a strong program
Here’s the part that surprises people.

North Carolina already has one of the stronger public pre-kindergarten programs in the country.

NC Pre-K meets nearly every national quality benchmark. Studies show children who attend perform better in vocabulary, literacy, and math readiness when they enter school.

And long-term research from Duke University shows the effects don’t disappear after kindergarten. Students who attended NC Pre-K show improved reading and math performance even years later in middle school.

That’s rare in education policy. Most interventions fade out.

This one doesn’t.

So if the program works, why are we still struggling?

Because the real problem isn’t quality.

It’s access.

Thousands of children never get a seat
Right now in North Carolina, thousands of children who qualify for NC Pre-K never get into the program.

Only about 59% of eligible four-year-olds from lower-income families are actually enrolled.

That means every year, tens of thousands of children who could benefit from early education enter kindergarten without it.

And here’s the part most people don’t realize:

Even if a child qualifies for NC Pre-K, they are not guaranteed a spot.

Eligibility does not equal enrollment.

Whether a child gets in depends on how much funding the legislature provides and whether local providers have room.

Imagine applying that logic to any other grade in public school.

Imagine telling a second grader:

“You’re eligible to attend school… but we ran out of seats.”

That’s effectively what happens every year in early childhood education.

The real problem is the system underneath it
But even this doesn’t tell the full story.

Because the real issue isn’t just pre-K.

It’s the entire early childhood system underneath it.

Child care for infants and toddlers is one of the most difficult services in the economy to provide.

Young children require very low teacher-to-child ratios. That means staffing costs are high.

At the same time, most families cannot afford the true cost of care.

So the system operates in an impossible middle ground:

Parents can’t afford it.
Providers struggle to stay open.
Teachers are paid very little.

In North Carolina, early childhood educators earn roughly $15 an hour on average.

Nearly half have relied on public assistance at some point.

Turnover in the profession has climbed to nearly 40 percent.

When teachers leave, classrooms close.

When classrooms close, families lose care.

And the entire pipeline leading into pre-kindergarten begins to break down.

The quiet collapse happening across the state
Over the past several years, North Carolina has lost more than 13 percent of its child care providers.

At the same time, the waiting list for child care subsidies has surged from roughly 2,000 children to more than 15,000.

Parents can’t find care.

Providers can’t find workers.

Teachers can’t afford to stay in the profession.

So by the time children reach age four — the age when NC Pre-K begins — the system feeding into it is already strained.

This isn’t just an education issue
It’s also an economic one.

When families can’t find child care, parents can’t work.

Businesses lose employees.

Productivity drops.

Economists estimate that child care shortages cost North Carolina more than $5 billion a year in lost economic activity.

Which means early childhood education isn’t just about helping children.

It’s about whether our state’s economy can function.

The debate we should be having
If North Carolina truly wanted to improve educational outcomes, there may be no more effective investment than early childhood education.

Not another testing overhaul.

Not another curriculum fight.

Not another round of political arguments about schools.

Just making sure every child enters kindergarten ready to learn.

Republicans often talk about workforce participation and economic growth.

We, Democrats talk about opportunity and educational equity.

Early childhood education sits right at the intersection of both.

But it requires confronting a basic reality:

If we want a functioning early childhood system, we have to be honest about the cost of providing it.

Not the imaginary cost.

The real one.

Until then, North Carolina will keep debating the outcomes of our education system while ignoring the moment the gap actually begins.

And that moment comes long before the first school bell rings.

- Senator Caleb Theodros

Here’s a statistic that should make all of us pause.

The average age of a first-time homebuyer in America is now 42.
The highest it has ever been.

At first glance, it might not seem like a huge shift. People are living longer. Careers start later. Maybe buying a home later is just part of modern life.

But when you zoom out, that small change carries huge consequences for how wealth is built in America.

Why housing has always mattered
For most of the past century, homeownership has been the primary wealth-building tool for the American middle class.

Not stocks.
Not private equity.
Not venture capital.

A house.

And the traditional model looked something like this:

You buy a home in your early 30s.
You take out a 30-year mortgage.
You finish paying it off in your early 60s, right as retirement begins.

At that point, housing costs drop dramatically and you enter retirement with a fully owned asset.

That was the foundation of middle-class stability for generations.

What changes when people buy later
Now imagine that same timeline starting ten years later.

If you buy your first home at 40 or 42, that same 30-year mortgage doesn’t end in your early 60s.

It ends around 70 or 72.

Housing costs — which historically disappeared before retirement — now overlap with retirement years.

Instead of entering retirement with a paid-off home, many households will still be making mortgage payments.

That’s not just a financial shift.

It changes how people experience the entire arc of adulthood.

The second-order effect: inequality
There’s another dynamic happening at the same time.

People who buy earlier capture more years of appreciation and build equity for longer.

People who buy later capture less lifetime housing wealth, even if they eventually own the same type of home.

Over time, that creates a structural divide:

One group builds wealth through owning assets.

Another group spends a larger share of their life paying for access to housing.

Same country. Same housing market. Very different outcomes.

The emotional side of housing
Housing isn’t just about finance.

For many people, owning a home represents something deeper — stability, permanence, and the feeling that you’ve built something that lasts.

When that milestone moves further out of reach, it carries emotional consequences too.

We’re seeing growing connections between housing instability and stress, anxiety, and depression, particularly among younger adults who feel like they’re running harder each year just to stay in place.

When people feel like they’re constantly paying for life but never actually building anything, it changes how they see the future.

Why timing matters more than we think
The key insight here isn’t just that homes are expensive.

It’s that timing matters.

A shift of even ten years in when people enter the housing market changes:

• how long they build equity
• how long they benefit from appreciation
• whether housing costs disappear before retirement

In other words, small changes in the timing of homeownership can reshape the economic trajectory of the middle class.

And over time, those shifts ripple through everything — wealth, inequality, retirement, and even how people feel about their place in society.

It’s something policymakers, economists, and communities need to start thinking about more seriously.

Because housing has never just been about shelter.

It’s about how a society builds stability across generations.

— Caleb

After hearing from so many neighbors, families, and small business owners along the I-77 corridor, it’s clear people want a real voice in decisions that will shape their communities for generations.

Senator Salvador and I have formally asked the Governor to pause the procurement process so we can ensure meaningful public input, full transparency, and a thorough review before moving forward.

Growth matters. Infrastructure matters. But so does trust.

Read the full letter below.

My sister is heading to rural Alaska for the next two months to provide medical care to communities that otherwise wouldn’t have access. While most people move toward comfort, she’s choosing service — stepping into places where the need is real and often overlooked. Your courage, discipline, and sense of purpose inspire me more than you know. Wishing you safety, strength, and steady hands. Proud of you, always.

Let’s talk about property taxes—because what’s happening right now is as dishonest as it is predictable.

Last week, Senate Republicans quietly created an ad hoc committee to “study” rising property taxes. Sounds reasonable at first glance. Except for one small detail: not a single Democratic senator was invited to participate.

That alone should raise eyebrows. But the bigger issue is this: We already know why property taxes are going up.

What’s actually happening

Over the past decade, property taxes have increased in nearly every county in North Carolina. This isn’t a coincidence. And it’s not because counties suddenly got greedy.

It’s because we’ve systematically defunded the state.

Here’s the chain reaction no one wants to talk about:
1. The General Assembly slashes corporate tax rates and cuts income taxes for the highest earners.
2. That blows a hole in the state budget.
3. Counties and local governments are left without adequate state support to fund basic services—schools, emergency services, infrastructure.
4. With nowhere else to turn, localities raise property taxes to keep the lights on.

That’s it. That’s the story.

Who ends up paying?
Not corporations.
Not the wealthiest earners.
It’s homeowners.
Seniors on fixed incomes.

Families who’ve lived in their communities for decades and helped build the very state we’re all proud of.

So let’s be honest about what’s happening:
We’re shifting the tax burden off corporations and the wealthy and placing it squarely on homeowners.

And now, instead of owning that decision, Republican leadership wants to create a “committee” to pretend this is some great mystery.
It isn’t.

Why this committee is a sham
Starting a property tax committee—while excluding half the legislature and ignoring the root cause—isn’t serious policymaking. It’s political cover.
If you want property taxes to stop rising, you don’t need another committee.

You need to stop starving the state of revenue and forcing counties to clean up the mess.
Until we’re willing to have that honest conversation, homeowners will keep paying the price.

And I’m not going to let that go unchallenged.

-Senator Caleb Theodros

We often speak of violence as something sudden. Loud. Visible.

A gunshot. A riot. A shattered window.

Dr. King knew better.

There is another kind of violence—quieter, more polite, easier to ignore. It does not bleed immediately, but it corrodes all the same.

It is the violence of hunger in a nation of abundance.

The violence of parents working full time who still ration insulin.

The violence of young people drowning in frustration, not because they lack talent, but because opportunity has been fenced off and priced out.

This is not accidental violence. It is organized. Maintained. Rationalized.

In the richest country in human history, scarcity is no longer a resource problem. It is a political one.

We have the money.

We have the technology.

We have the productivity.

What we lack is the courage to distribute power instead of merely celebrating growth.

There is violence in telling a family that health insurance is a privilege, not a right—while insurers post record profits.

Violence in telling a child that education is the path forward, while we pay their teacher less than almost anywhere else in the country.

Violence in applauding North Carolina as the “number one place to do business” while ranking near the bottom in teacher pay and worker protections.

That contradiction is not neutral. It harms people.

Dr. King warned that injustice anywhere is a threat everywhere. My father would have added that injustice, when left unchallenged, metastasizes—into cynicism, into anger, into despair.

And then we ask why people stop believing.

Why they disengage.

Why they lash out or give up.

We should not be surprised. We taught them that the system hears applause more clearly than pain.

Real violence is not only what shocks the conscience in a moment—it is what deadens it over time.

When a society normalizes preventable suffering, it is not stable. It is merely delaying the reckoning.

MLK Day should not be a ceremony. It should be a mirror.

If we truly honor his legacy, we must stop confusing economic rankings with moral success. Growth without justice is not progress. Prosperity without dignity is not peace.

The question before us is not whether we can do better.

It is whether we are willing to confront the quiet violence we’ve learned to live with—and decide, finally, to end it.

The votes are in! Congratulations Caleb Theodros as you move forward as the candidate for District 41 on Nov. 5th. Caleb Theodros for North Carolina State Senate District 41.

Whether it's the unhoused population, issues of substance abuse, or the child who can't focus in class because of what's going on at home; mental health is something that needs to be prioritized in the budget and in our policy. Learn more at www.calebnc.com/issues