Rod Paige, an educator, coach and administrator who pioneered the nation’s flagship No Child Left Behind law as the first African American to serve as U.S. education secretary, 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 years old.
Under Paige’s leadership, the Department of Education implemented the No Child Left Behind policy that became Bush’s signature education law in 2002 and was modeled on Paige’s previous work as superintendent of schools in Houston. The law established universal testing standards and sanctioned schools that failed to meet certain benchmarks.
“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in his statement. “Not satisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we called the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Rod worked hard to ensure that where a child was born did not 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 about 1,400 inhabitants. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served two years in the US Navy before becoming a football coach at the high school, and then junior college levels. Within years, Paige rose to the head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically black college in the capital city of Mississippi.
There, his team became the first — with a 1967 football game — to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, which was once an all-white venue.
After moving to Houston in the mid-seventies to become the head coach of Texas Southern University, Paige turned from the playing field to the classroom and education – first as a teacher, and then as an 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, at the time one of the largest school districts in the country.
He quickly attracted the attention of the most powerful politicians of Texas for his great educational reforms in the diverse city of Texas. In particular, he moved to implement stricter metrics for student outcomes, something that became a focal point of Bush’s 2000s bid for President. Bush – who later dubbed himself the “President of Education” – often praised Paige on the campaign for Houston reforms that he called the “Miracle of Texas.”
And once Bush won the 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 to childhood development.
“The easiest thing to do is to assign them a nice little task and hit them over the head,” he told the Washington Post at the time. “And that’s precisely what we don’t need. We need to assign high expectations to those people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: we expect them to achieve, and then we support them in their efforts to achieve.”
While some educators praised the law for standardizing expectations regardless of student race or income, others have complained for years about what they see as a maze of redundant and unnecessary testing and too much “teaching to the test” by educators.
In 2015, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to roll back many provisions from “No Child Left Behind,” which would reduce the Department of Education’s role in setting testing standards and prevent the federal agency from sanctioning schools that fail to improve. That year, then-President Barack Obama signed a major overhaul of education law, ushering in a new approach to accountability, teacher evaluations and how the worst-performing schools are pushed to improve.
After serving as secretary of education, Paige returned to Jackson State University half a century after being a student there, and served as the interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.
In his 90s, Paige still publicly expressed great concern, and optimism, about the future of US education. In an opinion piece that appeared in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige extolled 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.”