Rod Paige, nation’s first African American to serve as secretary of education, dies at 92

Rod Paige, the first African American U.S. Education Secretary who implemented the landmark No Child Left Behind law, died Tuesday at age 92, according to an announcement from former President George W. Bush.

“Rod was a leader and a friend,” Bush said in his statement. “Unsatisfied with the status quo, he challenged what we called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond.”

Born to two teachers in the small Mississippi town of Monticello, Paige began his career in education after serving two years in the U.S. Navy. His path initially led him to coaching football at the high school level before he advanced to become head coach at Jackson State University, his alma mater and a historically Black college in Mississippi’s capital.

In 1967, Paige’s team made history by becoming the first to integrate Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, which had previously been an all-white venue. This early demonstration of breaking barriers foreshadowed his later role in transforming American education.

Paige’s career took a pivotal turn when he relocated to Houston in the mid-1970s to become head coach at Texas Southern University. There, he transitioned from athletics to academics, starting as a teacher before climbing the administrative ladder. From 1984 to 1994, he served as the dean of the university’s college of education.

His reputation as an education reformer grew substantially when he became superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, one of the nation’s largest school systems at the time. His implementation of stricter metrics for student outcomes caught the attention of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, who frequently cited what he called the “Texas Miracle” during his 2000 presidential campaign.

After winning the presidency, Bush appointed Paige as U.S. Secretary of Education in 2001, a position he held until 2005. During his tenure, Paige oversaw the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which established universal testing standards and created consequences for schools failing to meet specific benchmarks.

“The easiest thing to do is assign them a nice little menial task and pat them on the head,” Paige told the Washington Post during his time as secretary. “And that is precisely what we don’t need. We need to assign high expectations to those people, too. In fact, that may be our greatest gift: expecting them to achieve, and then supporting them in their efforts to achieve.”

The No Child Left Behind legislation represented one of the most significant federal interventions in education policy in decades. While many educators praised the law for standardizing expectations regardless of students’ racial or economic backgrounds, critics argued it created excessive testing requirements and encouraged “teaching to the test” rather than broader educational development.

The law’s legacy proved complex and contentious. By 2015, a bipartisan effort in Congress rolled back many of its provisions, reducing the Education Department’s authority to set testing standards and removing its power to sanction underperforming schools. President Barack Obama signed this overhaul, marking a significant shift in federal education policy.

After his government service, Paige maintained connections to education. At 83, he returned to Jackson State University as interim president in 2016, coming full circle to the institution where his career began half a century earlier.

Even in his 90s, Paige remained engaged in educational discourse. In a 2024 opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle, he reflected on the city that had been instrumental in his rise 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.”

Throughout his career, Paige embodied the transformation of American education through several pivotal decades. From breaking racial barriers on the football field to implementing nationwide educational standards, his influence extended from local classrooms to federal policy, leaving an enduring impact on how America approaches educational equity and accountability.