Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

He was both the first Black person and the first educator to hold the cabinet position, but resigned amid discord over George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

Rod Paige, the education secretary, in Nashville in 2004.Credit...Brooks Kraft/Corbis, via Getty Images

Dec. 10, 2025, 12:28 a.m. ET

Rod Paige, who was President George W. Bush’s first secretary of education but who left amid a series of controversies that included attacks on foes of the No Child Left Behind law, died in Houston on Tuesday. He was 92.

His family announced his death in a statement, which was shared on social media by Commissioner Rodney Ellis of Harris County, where Houston is located. A cause of death was not provided.

“Rod worked hard to make sure that where a child was born didn’t determine whether they could succeed in school and beyond. He devoted his life to America’s young people and made a difference,” President Bush said in a statement.

A former school superintendent in Houston, Dr. Paige arrived in Washington with little political experience but with a reputation as a champion of urban education. He was the nation’s first Black secretary of education, the first actual educator to lead the department and a symbolic star of the administration’s “compassionate conservatism.”

He quickly embraced Mr. Bush’s top legislative priority, the No Child Left Behind Act, which called for national changes in public education, including standardized reading and math tests and remedial action to raise student achievement and school performances. The aim was to close the gap between poor and rich children. It passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Mr. Bush signed it on Jan. 8, 2002.

“No Child Left Behind was the cornerstone of major changes in the culture of education in this country,” Dr. Paige said in an interview for this obituary. “All of its elements were not successful, but its emphasis on testing, on the collection of information about the performance of pupils and schools, was a turning point, especially in the north.”

But the law’s complexity, and difficulties in putting federal mandates into effect on state and local levels, were enormous. As a condition for receiving federal education funds, states had to set standards for student performance at various grade levels and demonstrate periodic progress by testing. All teachers had to be “highly qualified,” and they and their schools faced penalties for failure to meet goals.

Many disadvantaged students, including those with learning disabilities or English-language deficiencies, fell short of standards. Others raced ahead. Some good teachers and schools were put on probation. Administrators called the yardsticks faulty. The system baffled parents. Governors said federal funds were insufficient. Teachers unions and state officials demanded changes in the law.

Less than a decade after Republicans had called for dropping education as a cabinet agency, the department, under No Child Left Behind, had overnight become a juggernaut of American life, overseeing assessments of schools across the country. Dr. Paige, who presided over a $53 billion budget and once-unimaginable powers over American classrooms, traveled the country selling the new law. He used the passionate language of civil rights to defend it, likening its goals of educating children to “life itself.”

He also used zealous language to voice his personal views. In 2003, he said he would prefer to put a child in a Christian school, and suggested that Christians were morally superior to others. It raised a ruckus and was the first of a series of missteps.

In February 2004, as opposition to the law grew widespread and Dr. Paige as its point man became a symbol of its troubles, his frustrations boiled over. In a meeting with governors at the White House, he called the 2.7 million-member National Education Association, one of America’s largest labor unions, “a terrorist organization” because of its resistance to No Child Left Behind.

Dr. Paige apologized to the nation’s teachers, but repeated his criticism of the union. “It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics that the N.E.A.’s Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind’s historic education reforms,” he said. But Dr. Paige, who had come of age in segregationist Mississippi, added: “As one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks, I should have chosen my words better.”

In the ensuing uproar, leaders of the N.E.A. and other unions, Democratic governors and members of Congress, and editorialists across the country denounced Dr. Paige’s “terrorist” remarks as an ad hominem attack. Many suggested that the comment disqualified him as a spokesman for national educational policy.

Other controversies swirled around Dr. Paige. It emerged that he had not played a major role in shaping No Child Left Behind, though he said he had collaborated with the White House behind the scenes. And while he had been called the architect of reforms in Houston’s schools, published reports suggested that the spectacular gains were partly illusory, and that the declining dropout rates had been falsified.

In another scandal, Dr. Paige’s department acknowledged, in response to published reports, that it had poured $700,000 of taxpayers’ money into a “public relations” campaign to promote No Child Left Behind, using television segments crafted to sound like news reports and slipped into broadcasts as if they were genuine journalism.

Shortly after Mr. Bush was re-elected in November 2004 and questions arose about his second-term cabinet choices, Dr. Paige announced that he would resign at the end of the president’s first term. Mr. Bush soon nominated his chief domestic policy adviser, Margaret Spellings, as Dr. Paige’s replacement. But the fallout over his tenure continued.

In January 2005, USA Today revealed that Dr. Paige’s department had paid Armstrong Williams, a conservative Black syndicated columnist and broadcast commentator, $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind to his audiences, and even to put Dr. Paige on the air to make pitches about the policy. The secretary called it a “straightforward distribution of information about the department’s mission.”

But the Federal Communications Commission ruled that the payments for television spots masquerading as news reports, and those for Mr. Williams’s promotions, were illegal. The press called them bribes. Mr. Bush disavowed them and forbade cabinet members from paying commentators to promote his policies. Dr. Paige resigned weeks before Mr. Bush’s second-term inaugural.

“This debacle is unfortunately consistent with how the Education Department has been run under Mr. Paige,” The New York Times said in an editorial. “The management has consistently placed ideology ahead of the public interest. It has neglected the core goals of the No Child Left Behind Act — like strengthening public education by strengthening teachers — while advancing the interests of religious conservatives and others who favor funds for private school education at public expense.”

Roderick Raynor Paige was born in Monticello, Miss., on June 17, 1933, the oldest of five children of Raynor and Sophie (Stevens) Paige. His father was a public school principal and his mother a librarian. Rod and his siblings, Elaine, Alfretta, Raygene and James, attended local segregated schools. He graduated from Lawrence County Training School, a high school, in 1951.

A talented football player, he won an athletic scholarship and majored in physical education at Jackson State University, a historically Black school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955.

In 1956, he married Gloria Crawford. They had a son, Roderick Jr., and were divorced in 1982. In 2009, he married Stephanie D. Nellons, a regent of Texas Southern University, who had a daughter, Danielle, by a previous marriage.

Dr. Paige is survived by his wife, Stephanie D. Nellons-Paige; his son, Roderick Jr.; stepdaughter Danielle Robinson; and two sisters, Elaine Witty and Raygiene Paige, according to the statement from the family shared by Commissioner Ellis.

After two years in the Navy, he coached football at Mississippi community and junior colleges from 1957 to 1963. He also earned a master’s degree and a doctorate, both in physical education, at Indiana University.

From 1964 to 1968, he was head football coach at Jackson State. In a footnote to sports and civil rights history, his team played Grambling State, a perennial powerhouse, in Jackson at Veterans Memorial Stadium, which had been segregated since its inception in 1950. But on Oct. 21, 1967, the two Black teams and 43,000 fans desegregated it en masse. Jackson State won 20-14.

At Texas Southern University, Dr. Paige was the head football coach from 1971 to 1975, and the athletic director from 1971 to 1980. Then, moving from sports to academics, he taught education courses at Texas Southern from 1980 to 1984, and then became dean of education for a decade.

On the Houston Board of Education from 1989 to 1994, he helped to decentralize the city schools. In 1994, he became Houston’s superintendent of schools, and won credit for revitalizing the nation’s seventh largest school district. He recruited top teachers, cut violence and sharply improved reading scores of Black and Latino pupils, partly by tying teachers’ pay to performance gains. The American Association of School Administrator named him national superintendent of the year in 2001.

Impressed by his results, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas modeled No Child Left Behind partly on Dr. Paige’s innovations, and chose him for his presidential cabinet. Dr. Paige was with Mr. Bush on a visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., when the president was notified that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

After leaving Washington in 2005, Dr. Paige, a Houston resident, wrote two books with Elaine Witty: “The War Against Hope: How Teachers’ Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers and Endanger Public Education” (2006) and “The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing It Is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time” (2010), which faulted national Black leaders for inadequately supporting No Child Left Behind. Dr. Paige was the interim president of his alma mater, Jackson State, from November 2016 to June 2017, succeeding Dr. Carolyn Meyers, who resigned over the university’s rapidly diminishing financial footing.

In 2015, after more than 13 years of federally mandated testing and control of America’s public schools, President Barack Obama signed into law a sweeping rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act that returned power to states and local districts to improve their troubled schools. The new version, the Every Student Succeeds Act, preserved some standardized testing, but eliminated punitive consequences for states and localities that performed poorly.

At a surprise birthday party for Dr. Paige in 2023, more than $100,000 was raised for scholarships for Texas Southern University students majoring in education.

Dr. Paige, in his obituary interview with The Times, was unforgiving of the teachers unions that fought his innovations, but conceded that the 2015 law offered “some benefits by giving more control to the states.” Senator Lamar Alexander, however, a Tennessee Republican and architect of the new law, said that No Child Left Behind had been justly consigned to the dustbin of history.

“The backlash to Washington trying to tell 100,000 schools too much about what they should be doing,” Mr. Alexander said, “caused people on both the left and the right to remember that the path to higher standards and better teaching and real accountability is community by community, classroom by classroom, state by state, and not through the federal government dictating every solution.”

Qasim Nauman contributed reporting.

Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT