Rod Paige, first Black to serve as US secretary of education, dies at 92
Rod Paige, the educator, coach and executive who implemented 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 nominated Paige to the nation’s top federal education post, announced the death in a statement but did not provide further details. Paige was 92 years old.
Under Paige’s leadership, the Department of Education implemented the No Child Left Behind policy, which became Bush’s signature education law in 2002 and was modeled on Paige’s previous work as a school superintendent in Houston. Law built-in universal tests standards and sanctioned schools that fail to meet certain criteria.
“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in the statement. “Dissatisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we call the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born did not determine whether he or she could succeed in school and beyond.”
Roderick R. Paige was born to two teachers in Monticello, a small town of about 1,400 people in Mississippi. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served two years in the U.S. Navy before coaching high school football and then coaching football at the middle school level. Over the years, Paige rose to become the head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and historically black college in Mississippi’s capital city.
There, his team became the first to integrate the once all-white Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, with a football game played in 1967.
After moving to Houston to become the head coach at Texas Southern University in the mid-1970s, Paige moved from the playing field to the classroom and education — first as a teacher, then as an administrator, and finally as dean of the school of education from 1984 to 1994.
As Paige became increasingly publicly recognized for her pursuit of educational excellence, she became superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, then one of the largest school districts in the country.
He quickly attracted the attention of Texas’ most powerful politicians for his sweeping education reforms in several Texas cities. Most importantly, it moved to impose more stringent criteria for student outcomes; this became the central point of Bush’s presidential bid in the 2000s. Bush, who would later call himself the “Education President,” frequently praised Paige during the campaign for her Houston reforms, which he called the “Texas Miracle.”
When Bush won the election, he appointed Paige as the nation’s top education official.
Paige, who served as education secretary from 2001 to 2005, emphasized her belief that high expectations are essential to childhood development.
“The easiest thing to do is give them a nice little task and pat them on the head,” he said. Washington Post In that case. “And that’s exactly what we don’t need. We need to place high expectations on these people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: expecting them to succeed and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”
While some educators applauded the law for standardizing expectations regardless of a student’s race or income, others have complained for years about what they see as a maze of redundant and unnecessary tests and that educators are doing too much “teaching to the test.”
House and Senate in 2015 MPs agreed to withdraw Many provisions in “No Child Left Behind” narrow the Education Department’s role in setting testing standards and prevent the federal agency from imposing sanctions on schools that fail to improve. That year, then-President Barack Obama signs comprehensive education law overhaulIt takes a new approach to accountability, teacher evaluations, and efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools.
After serving as secretary of education for half a century, Paige returned to Jackson State University and served as interim president in 2016, at the age of 83.
In her 90s, Paige still publicly expressed deep concern and optimism about the future of U.S. education. One opinion piece Appearing in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige lifted up the city that helped propel her to national prominence and encouraged 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.”
