Rod Paige, an educator, coach and administrator who introduced the nation’s landmark No Child Left Behind law and became the first African American to serve as U.S. education secretary, died Tuesday.
Former President George W. Bush, who appointed Page to the nation’s top federal education position, announced Page’s death in a statement but gave no further details. Page is 92 years old.
Under Page, the Department of Education implemented the No Child Left Behind policy, which became Bush’s signature education law in 2002 and was modeled on Page’s previous work as a school superintendent in Houston. The law sets common testing standards and imposes sanctions on schools that fail to meet certain benchmarks.
“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in a statement. “He was dissatisfied with the status quo and challenged what we call the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.'” Rod worked to ensure that where a child was born did not determine their success in school and beyond. “
Roderick R. Paige was born in Monticello, Mississippi, a town of about 1,400 residents, the son of two teachers. The oldest of five siblings, Paige served in the U.S. Navy for two years before becoming a high school and junior college football coach. Within a few years, Page was promoted to head coach at Jackson State, his alma mater and a historically black college in Mississippi’s capital city.
There, his team became the first to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, once an all-white venue, for a 1967 football game.
Page moved to Houston in the mid-1970s to become the head coach at Texas Southern University, before moving from the playing field to the classroom and education—first as a teacher, then as an administrator, and ultimately as dean of the school’s College of Education from 1984 to 1994.
With public recognition of his commitment to educational excellence, Page was promoted to superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, then one of the largest school districts in the United States.
He quickly caught the attention of Texas’ most powerful politicians for his sweeping education reforms in the diverse Texas city. Most notably, he began implementing stricter measures of student achievement, which became a central point of Bush’s presidential campaign in the 2000s. Bush, who later dubbed himself the “Education President,” often praised Page during his campaign for reform in Houston, which he called the “Texas Miracle.”
After Bush won the hotly contested election, he appointed Page as the nation’s top education official.
As a member of the Bush Cabinet from 2001 to 2005, Page emphasized his belief that high expectations are critical to child development.
“The simplest thing is to give them a small, menial 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 also need to have high expectations for these guys. In fact, that might be our greatest gift: Expecting them to achieve their goals and then supporting them in their efforts to get there.”
While some educators praised 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 testing and too much “teaching to the test” by educators.
In 2015, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to roll back many provisions of No Child Left Behind, narrowing the Department of Education’s role in setting testing standards and preventing federal agencies from sanctioning schools that fail to improve. That year, then-President Barack Obama signed sweeping education law reforms that introduced new accountability systems, teacher evaluations and ways to drive improvements in the lowest-performing schools.
After serving as education secretary, Page returned to Jackson State University after half a century and served as interim president in 2016 at the age of 83.
In his 90s, Page still publicly expressed deep concern and optimism about the future of American education. In a 2024 op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Page praised the city that helped propel him to national prominence, urging readers to “find Houston not only for inspiration but also for hard-won lessons about what works, what doesn’t, and how to shake up a stagnant system.”
