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Rod Paige, a teacher, coach and administrator who initiated the country’s historic “No Child Left Behind” policy as the first African American to serve as U.S. secretary of education, died Tuesday.
Former President George W. Bush, who had selected 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, which became one of Bush’s signature laws in 2002 and was based on Paige’s previous work as school superintendent. houstonThe law established universal testing standards and sanctioned schools that failed to meet certain standards,
“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 ensure that a child’s place of birth did not determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond.”
Roderick R. Paige was born to two teachers in a small mississippi Monticello town of approximately 1,400 residents. The eldest of five siblings, Page served a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy before becoming a football coach at the high school and then junior college level. Within a few years, Page became the head coach of Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically black college in Mississippi’s capital city.
There, his team became the first to integrate a football game in 1967 at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, which was once an all-white venue.
After moving to Houston to become head coach in the mid-1970s texas At Southern University, Page shifted focus from the playing field to the classroom and education – first as a teacher, and then as an administrator and ultimately as dean of its College of Education from 1984 to 1994.
Amid growing public recognition of his pursuit of educational excellence, Paige became superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, one of the largest school districts in the country at the time.
He immediately attracted the attention of Texas’s most powerful politicians for his sweeping education reforms in the diverse Texas city. Most notably, he moved to implement strict metrics for student outcomes, something that became a centerpiece of Bush’s 2000 bid for the presidency. Bush – who later dubbed himself the “Education President” – frequently praised Paige during the campaign for the Houston reforms, which he called “the Texas Miracle.”
And once Bush won the election, he chose Page to become the nation’s top education official.
As Secretary of Education from 2001 to 2005, Paige emphasized her belief that high expectations were essential for early childhood development.
“The easiest thing to do is to give them a nice little task and pat them on the head,” he told The Washington Post at the time. “And that’s exactly what we don’t need. We need to have even higher expectations of those people. In fact, this may be our greatest gift: expecting them to achieve, and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”
While some teachers 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 teachers.
In 2015, House and management committee Lawmakers agreed to roll back several provisions of “No Child Left Behind,” which reduced the Education Department’s role in setting testing standards and barred the federal agency from sanctioning schools that fail to improve. That year, then President Barack Obama Comprehensive education law changes were signed into law, introducing accountability, teacher evaluation and a new approach to improving the worst-performing schools.
After serving as Secretary of Education, Page returned to Jackson State University as a student for half a century and served as interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.
Even in his 90s, Page publicly expressed deep concern and optimism about the future of American education. In an opinion article written in the Houston Chronicle in 2024, Paige exalted the city that helped propel her to national prominence, urging readers to “look to Houston not only for inspiration, but for hard-learned lessons about what works, what doesn’t and what it takes to shake up a stagnant system.”