03/13/2026
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
