Leadership Quote by George Pataki

The line sounds like bland Albany boilerplate until you notice its quiet weaponry: Pataki is drawing a moral map of New York without naming a single county. “Some areas” are virtuous, “others” are negligent. That vagueness is the point. It lets him indict lagging districts while keeping the door open to everyone who wants to hear themselves in the flattering half of the sentence.

As a politician, Pataki isn’t merely describing uneven school support; he’s setting up a contrast that shifts responsibility downward. The state becomes the referee, not the spender. By framing the problem as local effort - “providing enormous help” versus “not doing what they can” - he implies the barrier isn’t resources or structural inequality so much as willpower and management. It’s a familiar move in education politics: translate a messy ecosystem of tax bases, funding formulas, union contracts, and regional poverty into a cleaner story of performance and accountability.

The subtext is also coalition math. Suburban and upstate voters who believe their districts “do everything right” get validated; urban districts, often portrayed as inefficient, get gently scolded without triggering accusations of explicit blame. The phrase “help to their students” lands emotionally because it sidesteps abstract policy and invokes children, a rhetorical shield that makes tough reforms sound like common sense.

In context, this kind of language typically precedes either pressure for standards-and-testing accountability or an argument against simply pouring more statewide money into struggling districts. It’s the politics of redistribution rewritten as the politics of effort.