Education Nominee Admired for Turning Around Houston’s Schools

He took office amid bitter protests. He faced leading a community where an ethnic minority, Latinos, felt shut out of the debate. Some experts even worried about his lack of experience.

But Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent, was widely considered one of the most successful school administrators in the country by the time President-elect George W. Bush nominated him Friday to be the nation’s Education secretary.

Seven years after taking charge at the Houston Independent School District, Paige oversees a system routinely visited by admiring educators from other states. Houston academic test scores have soared. A sharply fractured school community has largely unified. And as one of Houston’s leading black Republicans, Paige made the city a flagship for many of Bush’s favorite education projects.

“I wanted an educator who had proven that urban schools can be excellent schools, and Rod Paige is the right person,” Bush said as he announced the nomination in Washington. “He understands that we have the need to make sure we don’t shuffle children through our system, we don’t give up on any child, regardless of their background.”

The son of a principal and a librarian, Paige grew up in segregated Mississippi. Members of his family, he told the Dallas Morning News, were die-hard Democrats. But he became a Republican because in Mississippi, “the guys that were lynching us were Democrats.”

He has known the Bushes since the 1970s, helping with the 1980 presidential campaign of George Bush, the president-elect’s father, and talking up Texas’ education triumphs at this year’s Republican National Convention.

Bush, he said Friday, was “the education governor” who helped his policies work. “You didn’t just talk the talk, you walked the walk,” Paige told the president-elect. “You see, we know that if expectations . . . are set high, and if educators and parents work hard together, every child can thrive.” Paige, 67, attended Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., on a sports scholarship and later earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in physical education at Indiana University. He was head football coach at Texas Southern University before becoming a professor and dean of education there. In 1989, he became a trustee on Houston’s school board.

When the board appointed Paige four years later to replace an ousted superintendent, many Houston Latinos, the largest constituency in the school district, protested that they had been excluded from the process of his selection. The brisk, plain-spoken superintendent has largely healed those wounds, many Latino leaders now say. “He has relatively small opposition now,” said Leonel Castillo, educational liaison to Houston Mayor Lee P. Brown. “The way he reached out to the Latino community was with school construction and playing fields and [numerous] other programs. We’ve spent almost a billion dollars on fixing schools in Houston in the last four years.”

Paige was similarly methodical in tackling other problems plaguing Houston’s schools. Running schools, he has said, is a managerial job as much as running a business. Establishing accountability is Paige’s mantra: Houston administrators and teachers are responsible for students’ test scores.

Under Paige, achievement tests are given routinely, social promotion has been abolished and underperforming students are no longer exempt from school test scores.

He has strongly supported charter schools, another approach that Bush favors, although they have had only mixed results so far in Houston. Paige also favors a limited school voucher system, which Bush backs.

The percentage of Houston students passing state achievement tests has risen from 37% in 1995 to 73% in 2000. Paige also successfully promoted a 1998 bond proposal, which included a tax increase, that raised $678 million for new schools and school improvements.

School violence has dropped 20% since Paige took his post.

Paige’s record has attracted the attention of other school systems, including that of Los Angeles, which recently considered hiring him. In response to that and other outside inquiries, the Houston school board unanimously voted Paige a 26% pay increase, to $275,000.

“Rod Paige will be a dynamic education secretary,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said Friday. “He will bring to the Department of Education the innovative reform he successfully implemented” in Houston.

Paige’s selection also has drawn praise from many in the academic community--even some like Texas Teachers Federation leader Gayle Fallon, who has wrangled with Paige over teachers’ salaries. “It will be good for urban school districts in general,” she said.

Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a centrist group, also supported the nomination. “We think that having someone that is actually connected to kids, as Rod Paige is, and has a track record regardless of what kinds of rules and procedures exist, is a good thing,” Allen said. But, she added, “we’re not sure how you can bring a Texas-like accountability system to Washington. Only 6% of education dollars come from Washington. The package that Bush wants to promote is based on standards and testing and consequences, which cost money. And how do you do that from Washington?”

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Profile: Rod Paige

* Born: June 17, 1933

* Education: Undergraduate degree, Jackson (Miss.) State University; master’s and doctorate, Indiana University

* Career highlights: Houston schools superintendent since 1994; Houston school board member, 1989-94; dean of the College of Education at Texas Southern University; faculty member at University of Cincinnati, Jackson (Miss.) State College, Utica (Miss.) Junior College; head football coach at TSU.

* Family: Divorced, one son

* Quote: “I think the public is where we need to begin our work. This is a public system, it is for the public’s benefit, it is a public good, and the public must bring itself together and work hard to achieve it.”

Source: Associated Press