Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is making the pitch for his fiscal year 2014 budget package, which includes $131 million in new investments in high-quality early education. One stop was Joe Matthieu’s News Watch show on WBZ-AM radio. Listen.

“Early education – quality early education – and the ability to assure that our children are proficient in reading by third grade is well documented as an indicator of future academic success. And I’m not just talking about through high school. I mean in life. Imagine that. So everything else, if you don’t get it by then, everything else is catch-up and remediation,” Governor Patrick told Matthieu.

“I think that people really do get that investing in the early years has a big impact over time. It doesn’t mean that you stop investing after they reach the third grade, but there are things that you do in the very early years that are going to have a long-term impact,” the governor said.

“In government we have been stuck in governing for the short term. If it doesn’t have a short-term payoff in time for the next election season or the next news cycle then we don’t do it, and that’s a problem. We need to be about a generational responsibility. What do we do now that’s going to make a difference for the generation coming and the one after that? And investing in early childhood is something that’s precisely about that generational responsibility. And I think that’s why so many business groups support the idea.”