Rod Paige, the former Houston ISD superintendent and U.S. education secretary under President George W. Bush, will be laid to rest Thursday afternoon at Brentwood Baptist Church.
After a storied career as a leader in education, Paige leaves behind a legacy that reshaped public schools on both the local and national levels. Whether they were reshaped for the better, or worse, continues to be debated.
Condolences for Paige, who was 92 years old when he died Dec. 9, poured in last week. Bush and his wife, Laura, wrote, “Rod was a leader and a friend,” adding that he “devoted his life to America’s young people and made a difference.”
Mayor John Whitmire called Paige a “Houston Hero, respected educator and a dear friend.”
Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis said in a statement Paige helped him secure an undergraduate scholarship to Texas Southern University, the historically Black university in Houston’s Third Ward. Paige’s body will lie in state from 9 a.m.-noon Wednesday inside the Roderick R. Paige Education Building on the campus.
“His belief in young people was not abstract; he lived it, and I am one of many whose lives were shaped by his generosity and vision,” Ellis wrote in a post on X.
Paige was a central figure in the rise of test-based accountability, a philosophy that transformed how student achievement was measured, how schools were evaluated and how the federal government involved itself in local classrooms.
He is perhaps best known for his work on the No Child Left Behind Act, the sweeping and controversial education law signed in 2002 that expanded standardized testing nationwide and emphasized accountability systems.
Supporters credit Paige with setting high expectations and forcing long-overdue attention on achievement gaps between racial groups. Critics argue the policies he championed relied too heavily on testing, encouraged punitive systems and produced incentives that distorted outcomes.
His changes continue to spark debate even decades later — including in Houston ISD, where district leaders appointed by the Texas Education Agency two years ago have made standardized test scores a renewed priority.
“I wanted to be a football coach”
Paige’s perspective was shaped from an early age. Born in Monticello, Mississippi, he was raised by a librarian and a school principal. His upbringing made a career in education almost inevitable.
“I was kinda raised to be that way,” Paige told Mississippi Public Broadcasting in a 2017 interview.
But his first career steps would be in the athletics department.
Paige earned his bachelor’s degree at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and later completed his master’s and doctorate from Indiana University, with all three degrees in physical education. After graduating, Paige served a two-year stint in the Navy and was deployed to Okinawa, Japan.
After coming home, he took a job coaching football at the University of Cincinnati and then at Texas Southern University in Houston, but found himself gradually pulled into the classroom.
“That’s what I wanted to be, a football coach,” Paige also told Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “That’s where my aspirations actually stopped. I was just kind of pushed off into these other areas.”
He soon found himself climbing the ranks of education leadership at TSU — first as a professor, then as dean of the college of education, and in 1989 he was elected to the Houston ISD board of trustees. Just a few years later, when the superintendent resigned midterm, Paige’s colleagues urged him to take the district’s top job.
“I did not throw my hat in the ring,” Paige said to Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “Someone threw the hat at me.”
It was a hat he’d wear for nearly eight years, overseeing the largest school district in Texas and one of the largest in the country.
Terry Abbott, Paige’s longtime adviser, says he first met Paige in 1996 when he was interviewing to be press secretary for HISD. Abbott says it was clear what a powerful and focused leader Paige was.
AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson
“You just know when someone has it and when they don’t,” Abbott said. “And anybody who ever met Rod Paige knew within a few minutes, yeah, that guy’s got it. He gets it, he understands and he knows what he wants to do. That was a great place to work.”
Abbott says Paige’s impact at HISD was transformative.
“They oughta build a statue for Rod Paige in Houston,” Abbott said, “because he meant so much to that city and to the community and nationally.”
HISD became a model
Paige’s work in Houston would catapult the district and himself to national recognition.
As superintendent, Paige ushered in sweeping reforms, including expanding charter-style programs within the district and introducing performance-based pay for teachers. Many at the time credited Paige with dramatically improving the district. Test scores climbed, the district reported an astonishingly low high school dropout rate of 1.5%, and Houston ISD became a national model for urban school reform.
Steve Amstutz, who worked for years as a principal in the district, looks back fondly on his years working under Paige’s leadership.
“I remember it as an exciting time for me as a school leader, in large part because of the opportunities that Dr. Paige provided,” he said.
During his tenure, Paige secured voter approval for a $687 million bond, which aimed to update facilities and build new schools. At the time it was the largest in state history.
RELATED: Houston ISD bond rejected in large margin by voters, an unofficial referendum of state takeover
“The average age of a school building in Houston was older than the Astrodome,” Abbott said. “[Paige] said children need better facilities to go to school and he set about doing that.”
The reputation of Texas public schools, and particularly within HISD, was so strong, even then-Gov. George W. Bush pointed to its success on the presidential campaign trail in 2000 as proof that accountability could drive improvement.
“Our test scores are up in Texas because we set high standards,” Bush said at a Michigan rally in February 2000.
After winning the presidency, Bush tapped Paige to become U.S. secretary of education.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Abbott says he wasn’t surprised the president picked Paige, but shares that Paige told him he wasn’t sure if he’d accept the job. He recalls traveling with Paige to Washington for the meeting with Bush.
“He said, ‘Well, the president offered me the job,'” Abbott said. “And then he didn’t say anything. I said, ‘Did you take it?’ And he said, ‘Of course I took it. When the president asks you, you don’t turn that down.'”
Paige was the first African American to lead the U.S. Department of Education.
As secretary, Paige helped turn the principles he had applied in Houston into national policy. Within the first year of arriving in Washington, he stood alongside Sen. Ted Kennedy and then-Congressman John Boehner as Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act.
The law dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in public education and ushered in an era of high-stakes testing that still exists today.
“It was a house built on sand”
Paige has often been referred to as the “architect” of the policy.
“[Paige] was very active in the development [of No Child Left Behind], but more so in the execution of that policy and in getting it passed through Congress,” Abbott said. “Dr. Paige spent a lot of time up on Capitol Hill, lobbying legislators and urging them to approve this program and speaking from personal experience about how important this was to have that kind of standards and those kinds of accountability for children all over the country. And no one could really, in that regard, argue with him about it, because he was living proof that it worked.”
Jack Schneider is an education professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director for its Center for Education Policy. Schneider explains that the education movement that became No Child Left Behind began years before.
“I think architect is maybe the wrong professional metaphor there,” Schneider said. “He was the hype man. He had a good sales pitch and he had done it himself. In many ways he was like the owner [and] operator of a franchise who could speak from his own experience and who understood the kind of bigger plan that other leaders had been moving forward.”
The roots of No Child Left Behind can be traced back as early as 1989, when Bush’s father, then-President George H.W. Bush, convened governors in Charlottesville, Virginia, for an education summit. That meeting signaled a growing national push toward standardized testing and stricter accountability. The approach steadily gained momentum throughout the 1990s. By the time Paige entered the national stage in 2001, Schneider says, the groundwork for the law had already been laid.
Paige later clarified that the No Child Left Behind Act was more of an extension of the Clinton-era Improving America’s Schools Act.
“We did a lot of cut and paste from the previous bill and added our ideas to it,” Paige told Mississippi Public Broadcasting in 2017. “Made it stronger. Added more accountability.”
Much of No Child Left Behind was rolled back in 2015, when President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law.
But Schneider argues the new education law’s changes were modest, and that it extended the country’s dependency and attachment to standardized testing.
“The belief that if we can’t measure it via a standardized test, then we don’t know if we can trust the data, that’s a widespread belief these days that you just didn’t have prior to the No Child Left Behind era,” Schneider said.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
In a 2018 interview with the New York Times, Paige conceded that not all elements of No Child Left Behind were successful, but added its “emphasis on testing and data collection was nonetheless a ‘turning point’ in American education.’ “
Supporters like Abbott speak proudly of the policy.
“No Child Left Behind remains the greatest, boldest move In education history in this country,” he said.
Some scholars disagree.
Julian Vasquez Heilig worked in HISD’s research and accountability department during Paige’s tenure and now studies education policy.
“I was involved with the behind-the-scenes data work,” Vasquez Heilig said. “It’s important to understand that Houston was the proving ground for the whole model that later became No Child Left Behind.”
Vasquez Heilig explains perhaps the biggest issue with the education policy was its foundation.
“The real issue with No Child Left Behind is that it was a house built on sand,” he said.
“The Texas Miracle”
Concerns about Houston ISD’s seemingly stellar improvement under Paige emerged after he had moved on to Washington.
Investigations by 60 Minutes, The New York Times and NPR challenged the district’s celebrated gains. Reporters found thousands of students had been improperly classified as transfers rather than dropouts. Other reports showed that some low-performing students were excluded from testing, artificially boosting scores.
But Amstutz, a longtime HISD principal, questions whether the practice was as pervasive as critics suggest.
“I don’t think it was widespread,” he said. “It was egregious where it occurred, and it should not have occurred. [I] remember a few [schools] that were directly implicated so it doesn’t take a lot to really cast a shadow and implicate everybody.”
60 Minutes also reported the Texas Education Agency found in its own investigation widespread misclassification of thousands of dropouts.
Vasquez Heilig says when he worked in HISD, researchers were prevented from accessing and reviewing all of the data freely. He says there were consequences for researchers when they found data that didn’t align with the district’s vision.
“I don’t know how much of that can be ascribed to Rod Paige, but what I can tell you is that there were people that were very determined to tell a particular story about what was happening in Texas and what was happening in Houston, even though that story was false,” Vasquez Heilig said.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
When asked about the investigations, Abbott pushed back.
“A lot of that happened as President Bush was running for reelection,” Abbott said. “Some of those reports were, frankly, political.”
Abbott says Paige didn’t let the investigations bother him because “[Paige] knew the truth.” Abbott adds the New York Times investigation compared Houston’s results on Texas’ standardized tests to another exam called the Stanford Achievement Test to dismiss Houston’s gains. Abbott says he and Paige told the New York Times during the investigation the tests could not be compared.
“[They’re] two completely different tests that cannot be compared,” Abbott reiterated to Houston Public Media.
By the time all of the investigations were published, the so-called “Texas Miracle” was serving as the foundation for national policy.
For critics like Vasquez Heilig, that complicates Paige’s legacy.
“All of that was an illusion. It was not a miracle.” Vasquez Heilig said. “It’s important to understand the intended and unintended consequences of a policy that focuses on test and punishment. That’s the essence of accountability that took shape in that era because the narrative around what happened with Houston and No Child Left Behind is very different than the reality.”
He says he sees renewed interest in aspects of the policy, particularly in Texas with its emphasis on accountability systems, push for charter school partnerships and takeovers of several independent school districts, including Houston ISD.
The Houston district has improved its standardized test scores and accountability ratings under the instructional reforms implemented by state-appointed HISD superintendent Mike Miles, who has become a polarizing figure because the district also has seen widespread staffing turnover and continued declining enrollment during his two-year tenure.
Even in his 90s, Paige was still weighing in on education debates. Just last year, he penned an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, where he wrote “American education is at a crossroads,” but added that he saw a “glimmer of hope” in HISD.
He praised the state’s sweeping reforms and Miles’ New Education System, and called its early results “nothing short of remarkable.”
Paige acknowledged that under the takeover, missteps and backlash are inevitable, but added, “our school systems are in dire need of a fundamental overhaul, not just piecemeal tweaks. We need more districts willing to reimagine what’s possible, as HISD is doing on a scale never before seen in this country.”
Great Job & the Team @ Houston Public Media for sharing this story.
