Teacher In Chief

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Paige became an honor student and quarterback at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. His college roommate, Walter Reed, recalls that "if there was a test and somebody had made a 98, we knew it had to be Rod." Paige graduated in 1955 and took a series of college coaching jobs. He got his master's and doctorate in physical education at Indiana University, with a thesis on the response time of football linemen. That might have branded Paige a jock among educators in some places, but it confirmed him as a native speaker when he arrived in football-crazed Texas 30 years ago.

He went to interview for a job as head coach and athletic director at Texas Southern University in Houston. The position offered a big step up in pay and prestige, but Paige also wanted a faculty assignment. Granville Sawyer, 81, then president of Texas Southern, recalls, "I was convinced by the end of our conversation that this was a great mind and a great educational leader in the making."

Paige had been reared in a family of die-hard Democrats, in a county with "so few Republicans that the whole group would almost fit into a van," according to the editor of the local paper. But while living in Houston in the 1970s, he became active in the Republican Party. Why? Paige once told the Dallas Morning News that in Mississippi, "the guys that were lynching us were Democrats." He campaigned for the elder George Bush when he ran in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries, and Paige describes the Bush family as the "cream of the earth."

Friends emphasize that in setting education policy, Paige's only ideology is what works. When the typically polarizing debate of how to teach reading arose in Houston, Paige heard out proponents of both camps--"whole language" and phonics--and allowed his district to adopt a combination of the two. "He's quite masterly at bringing all kinds of different perspectives to the table and choosing the best one, no matter where or whom it comes from," says Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, an urban-schools coalition that recognized Paige in 1999 with a national award for excellence.

Paige's gift for crafting disparate ideas into a coherent and popular agenda will be sorely tested in Washington. And so will his legendary frugality: despite earning the highest salary of any U.S. school superintendent ($275,000 a year), Paige has lived in the same modest three-bedroom home for the past 30 years. He is divorced and has a son, Rod Jr., 41. Paige's biggest indulgence may be his wardrobe--Italian suits and ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

As the first local school superintendent ever to hold the nation's top education position, "Paige brings to the capital a sense of how schools really operate--of their capacities and constraints," says Casserly. That means a dose of reality for policymakers, and, it is hoped, a source of advocacy for kids.