Rod Paige
Based on Wikipedia: Rod Paige
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Rod Paige was sitting next to the President of the United States in a Florida elementary school classroom when an aide whispered that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center. The nation's first African American Secretary of Education watched as George W. Bush's face transformed with the realization that America was under attack. It was a moment that would define a presidency—and it happened just eight months into Paige's tenure at the helm of American education policy.
But here's the thing about Rod Paige: before he was in that room witnessing history, before he was shaping federal education law, before he was calling the nation's largest teachers union a "terrorist organization" (more on that spectacular gaffe later), he was a football coach in Mississippi trying to identify talent that others had overlooked.
From the Mississippi Delta to the Gridiron
Roderick Raynor Paige was born in 1933 in Monticello, Mississippi, a small town in the southwestern part of the state. His parents were both public school educators—a detail that would prove prophetic. Growing up Black in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era meant navigating a world of segregated schools, water fountains, and opportunities. Education, his parents understood, was one of the few ladders that couldn't be kicked away.
Paige earned his bachelor's degree from Jackson State University, one of the historically Black colleges that served as crucibles of African American achievement during segregation. He then headed north to Indiana University Bloomington, where he would eventually earn both a master's degree and a doctorate in physical education.
Between 1955 and 1957, Paige served in the United States Navy. This was just eight years after President Truman had officially desegregated the armed forces, and the military was still working through what that actually meant in practice. Paige emerged with both discipline and a broader view of America than Monticello had provided.
The Coach Who Found a Hall of Famer
After his Navy service, Paige returned to Mississippi to teach health and physical education. He coached at Hinds Agricultural High School and Utica Junior College—now the Utica Campus of Hinds Community College—from 1957 to 1963. These were formative years, working with young people in a state that was about to become ground zero for the civil rights movement.
In 1964, Paige became the head football coach at his alma mater, Jackson State University. This is where his eye for talent became legend.
Among the players Paige recruited was a young man named Lem Barney. Barney would go on to play cornerback for the Detroit Lions for eleven seasons, make seven Pro Bowls, and eventually earn induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992. A coach is often measured by the talent he develops, and Paige had identified something special in Barney that others had missed.
After four seasons at Jackson State, Paige moved to Texas Southern University in Houston, where he coached football from 1971 to 1975 and served as athletic director until 1980. The move to Houston would prove permanent. He'd found his city.
Fighting a Dump, Finding a Calling
When Paige settled in Houston's Brentwood subdivision in the 1970s, he discovered that his new neighborhood had an unwelcome neighbor: a dump at the community's edge. This was a common story in predominantly minority neighborhoods, which frequently found themselves hosting the landfills, incinerators, and industrial facilities that wealthier white communities successfully fought off. The practice would later be called environmental racism.
Paige didn't accept it. He organized residents to fight the dump through the legal system. The case wound its way up through Texas courts until the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the residents. It was Paige's first taste of civic victory outside the athletic arena, and it revealed something important about him: he was willing to fight institutional battles, not just coach others to win games.
From Professor to Superintendent
Throughout the 1980s, Paige transitioned fully from athletics to education. He taught at Texas Southern from 1980 to 1984, then became Dean of the College of Education, a position he held for a decade. During this time, he established the Center for Excellence in Urban Education, a research facility focused on the particular challenges of teaching children in cities—challenges like poverty, overcrowding, violence, and the mobility of families who move frequently.
In 1989, Paige joined the Board of Education of the Houston Independent School District as a trustee. This is where his philosophy of education reform began to crystallize. He co-authored something called "A Declaration of Beliefs and Visions," a document that called for fundamental reform through decentralization, accountability at all levels, and a focus on actual instruction rather than bureaucratic compliance.
The declaration wasn't just rhetoric. It launched what became an ongoing restructuring of HISD, one of the largest school districts in the nation.
One of Paige's more unusual initiatives was creating a real police department for the school district. Not security guards. Not resource officers borrowed from Houston PD. An actual municipal-style police force with officers certified by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. HISD's police department remains the only school district police department in the country to earn accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. Whether this represented innovation or the unfortunate militarization of schools depends on whom you ask.
The Houston Miracle
In 1994, Paige became superintendent of HISD. What followed became known, without irony at the time, as the "Houston Miracle."
Test scores rose. Dropout rates fell. The district seemed to be cracking a code that had stymied urban education for decades. Paige implemented a series of reforms that would become his calling card: charter schools with broad authority over their own decisions, competitive teacher salaries, performance contracts for administrators, and incentive pay for teachers who raised test scores.
The emphasis on test scores and accountability was novel for its time. Before No Child Left Behind made standardized testing the lingua franca of American education, Houston under Paige was already building a system where numbers mattered. Students were tested. Schools were ranked. Principals whose numbers didn't improve found themselves looking for new jobs.
Paige also made a controversial decision to contract with private schools to educate some HISD students. Rather than bus kids across the sprawling city to overcrowded public schools, he paid private schools certified by the Texas Education Agency to take them. To critics, this was an early form of vouchers, diverting public money to private institutions. To supporters, it was pragmatic problem-solving.
But miracles, as it turned out, required scrutiny.
Years later, investigations revealed that some schools had underreported their dropout numbers during Paige's tenure. Students who left school weren't always counted as dropouts—they were classified as having transferred, or moved away, or disappeared into categories that didn't damage the statistics. The Houston Miracle was real, but it was also, in part, an accounting trick.
This pattern—genuine progress mixed with questionable metrics—would become a recurring theme in education reform nationwide.
The First African American Secretary of Education
When George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000, he wanted an education secretary who understood his vision of accountability-based reform. He'd seen it work in Texas. He wanted someone who could make it work nationwide.
Rod Paige was confirmed by the Senate in January 2001, becoming the first school superintendent ever to serve as Secretary of Education and the first African American to hold the position. The Department of Education, created only in 1979, was still finding its footing. Paige would help define what it meant for the federal government to involve itself in education, traditionally a state and local matter.
The signature legislation of Paige's tenure was the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, which President Bush signed in January 2002. To understand No Child Left Behind, you need to understand what came before it.
The previous federal education law was the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, itself a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965—part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. These laws had sent federal money to schools serving disadvantaged students but hadn't demanded much in return. NCLB changed the deal: take our money, and you'll meet our standards. Test your students. Show progress. If you don't, there will be consequences.
The theory was elegant. By requiring states to test students regularly and disaggregate the results by race, income, and disability status, NCLB would shine a light on achievement gaps that had long been hidden in average scores. A school couldn't claim success if its white students were thriving while its Black students failed. The gaps would be visible, and schools would be held accountable for closing them.
In practice, NCLB proved more complicated. States set their own standards and designed their own tests, leading to a race to the bottom in some cases. Schools focused intensely on students near the proficiency cutoff while neglecting those far above or far below. Teaching to the test became standard practice, sometimes at the expense of deeper learning. And the law's requirement that one hundred percent of students reach proficiency by 2014 was, mathematically speaking, impossible.
Still, NCLB reshaped American education. It made testing ubiquitous. It made data inescapable. It made accountability—that favorite word of reformers—the central framework through which schools were judged. Paige's Department of Education, the same department that had failed to achieve clean audits for most of its history, managed three consecutive clean audits from Ernst & Young, a sign that at least the bureaucratic house was in order.
The Terrorist Organization Remark
In February 2004, Rod Paige stepped in it badly.
At a private meeting with governors, Paige referred to the National Education Association—the nation's largest teachers union, with millions of members—as a "terrorist organization."
This was, to put it mildly, not diplomatic.
The NEA had been critical of No Child Left Behind, arguing that the law imposed unfunded mandates on schools and reduced education to test prep. Paige was frustrated with their opposition. But calling them terrorists, even in what he thought was an off-the-record setting, was spectacularly ill-advised. It was 2004. The country was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The word "terrorist" meant something very specific and very serious.
Paige apologized within days, but the damage was done. His relationship with the union that represented most of America's public school teachers—people his department was supposed to support—was poisoned. The remark became a shorthand for the hostility between education reformers and teachers unions that would define the next two decades of education politics.
Later that year, Paige criticized the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), accusing them of being "fronts for white conservatives." This was odd, given that the NAACP is neither white nor conservative, and Paige himself was a member of the organization. The remark suggested a man increasingly isolated, speaking in ways that made allies uncomfortable and gave ammunition to critics.
After Washington
In November 2004, shortly after Bush won reelection, Paige announced his resignation. Margaret Spellings, Bush's domestic policy adviser, was nominated to succeed him. Paige had served four years, shepherded the most significant education legislation in a generation, and found himself exhausted by the political combat.
He returned to Houston and stayed involved in education. More than a decade later, from November 2016 to June 2017, he served as interim president of Jackson State University, returning to lead the institution where he'd once coached football and earned his undergraduate degree. It was a closing of a circle, the Mississippi kid who'd made it to Washington coming home to help the next generation.
Paige was married twice. His first marriage, to Gloria Crawford, lasted from 1956 to 1982 and produced a son, Roderick Jr. In 2009, he married Stephanie D. Nellons, becoming stepfather to her daughter Danielle.
Rod Paige died at his home in Houston on December 9, 2025, at the age of 92.
The Complicated Legacy
Houston has named an elementary school after Paige—the former James Bowie Elementary School is now Roderick R. Paige Elementary School. In his hometown of Monticello, Mississippi, the local middle school bears his name. Indiana University, where he earned his graduate degrees, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2017 and a Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 2013.
But Paige's real legacy is harder to measure than buildings and honors.
No Child Left Behind was officially replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which dialed back federal oversight and gave states more flexibility. Yet the testing culture that NCLB created persists. The emphasis on accountability persists. The achievement gaps that the law was designed to close have narrowed in some places and widened in others. The debate over whether standardized tests help or hurt students continues without resolution.
Paige believed that what gets measured gets done, that without data you couldn't know what was working, that schools had been allowed to fail poor and minority students because nobody was keeping score. He was right about the problem. Whether his solutions made things better or worse remains genuinely contested.
What's not contested is that Rod Paige mattered. A Black man from Jim Crow Mississippi who became a football coach, a professor, a superintendent, and the nation's top education official—that's an American story. He made decisions that affected every public school in the country. Some of those decisions helped children. Some probably didn't. All of them came from a man who believed, as his educator parents had taught him, that schools could change lives.
He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, having been initiated in 1952. He served on countless boards and commissions. He fought a dump in his neighborhood and won. He recruited a Hall of Fame cornerback. He called the teachers union terrorists and had to apologize. He sat next to the president on September 11th.
Rod Paige lived a full and consequential life. Education in America looks different because of him. Whether it looks better is a question we're still trying to answer.