Rod Paige, an educator, coach, and administrator who rolled out the nation’s landmark No Child Left Behind law as the first African American to serve as U.S. secretary of education, died Tuesday.
Former President George W. Bush, who tapped Paige for the nation’s top federal education post, announced the death in a statement but did not provide further details. Paige was 92.
Under Paige’s leadership, the Department of Education implemented the No Child Left Behind law that in 2002 became Bush’s signature education law and was modeled on Paige’s previous work as a schools superintendent in Houston. The law required states to test students annually in grades 3-8 and to intervene if groups of students, like those learning English or those from low-income families, failed to make steady progress.
“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in his statement. “Unsatisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond.”
Roderick R. Paige was born to two teachers in the small Mississippi town of Monticello of roughly 1,400 inhabitants. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy before becoming a football coach at the high school, and then junior college levels. Within years, Paige rose to head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically black college in the Mississippi capital city.
There, his team became the first—with a 1967 football game—to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, once an all-white venue.
After moving to Houston in the mid-1970s to become head coach of Texas Southern University, Paige pivoted from the playing field to the classroom and education—first as a teacher, and then as administrator and eventually the dean of its college of education from 1984 to 1994.
Amid growing public recognition of his pursuit of educational excellence, Paige rose to become superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, one of the largest school districts in the country.
He quickly drew the attention of Texas’ most powerful politicians for his sweeping educational reforms in the diverse Texas city. Most notably, he moved to implement stricter metrics for student outcomes, something that became a central point for Bush’s 2000 bid for president. Bush—who later would dub himself the “Education President”—frequently praised Paige on the campaign trail for the Houston reforms he called the “Texas Miracle.”
And once Bush won election, he tapped Paige to be the nation’s top education official.
As education secretary from 2001 to 2005, Paige emphasized his belief that high expectations were essential for childhood development.
“The easiest thing to do is assign them a nice little menial task and pat them on the head,” he told the Washington Post at the time. “And that is precisely what we don’t need. We need to assign high expectations to those people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: expecting them to achieve, and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”
Though widely praised when assuming leadership of the agency, Paige faced pressure from education groups to lessen the impact of the prescriptive law. The National Education Association, which had opposed its passage, called for his resignation after he referred to the teachers’ union as a “terrorist organization.”
And while some educators applauded the law for standardizing expectations regardless of student race or income, others complained for years about what they considered a maze of redundant and unnecessary tests and too much “teaching to the test” by educators.
Paige’s successor at the Education Department under Bush, Margaret Spellings, would offer limited flexibility from aspects of the law’s requirements.
In 2015, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to pull back many provisions from “No Child Left Behind,” shrinking the Education Department’s role in setting school improvement interventions. That year, then-President Barack Obama signed the sweeping education law overhaul, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, ushering in a new approach to accountability, teacher quality, and the way the most poorly performing schools are pushed to improve.
After serving as education secretary, Paige returned to Jackson State University a half century after he was a student there, serving as the interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.
Into his 90s, Paige still publicly expressed deep concern, and optimism, about the future of U.S. education. In an opinion piece appearing in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige lifted up the city that helped propel him to national prominence, urging readers to “look to Houston not just for inspiration, but for hard-won lessons about what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to shake up a stagnant system.”
