Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
I hope you are all headed into great holidays. This will be my last regular post for the year. Over the next week, we’ll publish a couple of looks back at 2025, including one from Larson reviewing the CharterFolk X posts we shared this year, as well as my regular Year in Review post which will come out between the holidays.
Today’s post is one I had meant to get out last week, but I struggled to get it right. It’s about the passing of former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige.
Many who knew Paige far better than I did have offered their tributes.
Nina, who worked closely with him, offered a great one …
… as did Mike, who also worked with Paige closely and attended the funeral on Friday.
Checker’s was excellent.
And so were the reflections from Don McAdams and others who served with Paige on the Houston ISD Board of Education.
The mainstream press, meanwhile, used his passing as an opportunity to re-litigate the impact of No Child Left Behind …
… the law whose legacy many want to make synonymous with the legacy of the man himself.
Now, far be it from me to claim I haven’t had my arguments with NCLB over the years.
But from my standpoint, the attempt to reduce the contribution of a titan like Rod Paige to four letters …
… or to a single, rigid interpretation of those four letters …
… seems a monumental disservice.
I didn’t get to know him as well as many others. So my own entry point to this discussion comes from a bit more distance. I only met Paige a few times, including in 2016 when I was on the board of the National Alliance and he was inducted into the National Charter School Hall of Fame.
The first time I came into close proximity to him was when he visited San Diego.
It was right as I was wrapping up my summer internship between my first and second years of business school. Paige and my old boss, Alan Bersin, were birds of a feather, so it was natural that the Secretary would make San Diego one of the stops on his tour promoting NCLB. I didn’t get a chance to speak with him directly, but I was part of the entourage accompanying him to the UC campus that day.
I still remember the moment vividly:
Paige striding down a hill at his urgent football-coach pace, Secret Service fanned around him.
It certainly made quite an impression.
So much so that when I returned to school, I convinced a team to study Paige’s rise to influence for a group project. It turned out to be one of the most fascinating assignments I worked on during my MBA program, one that ended up focusing on what, in my estimation, was the most important part of Rod Paige’s career:
What he did before NCLB.
What he did taking on the superintendency of Houston ISD.
What turned out to be arguably the boldest and most ambitious reform of a large urban school district the country had ever seen.
In taking it on with the moxie, strategic insight, and selflessness that Paige showed, he redefined what was thought to be possible …
… not just for that city, but for an entire nation.
Sparking what would become a generation of reform efforts.
Amid which the charter school movement itself was born.
And from the outset, he helped nurture the earliest Folk whose leadership would bring that movement to life.
This vantage point makes plain that any view making NCLB the primary lens through which we assess the legacy of Rod Paige is a fundamentally flawed one.
So, in the spirit of providing some balance to the record …
In the spirit of an altogether different take on NCLB …
… one intending to make sure that No Contribution is Left Belied …
… certainly not a contribution as transformational as the one made by Rod Paige …
I take on the remainder of this post.
A Nerf Ball with a Core of Steel
Preparing to write this column gave me a chance to read again the paper we wrote in business school. Most of it, I would say, got the story decently right, or at least close to how I would still cast it nearly a quarter century later. It was a great project, giving us the chance to reach out to various luminaries. Paul Hill was incredibly generous with his time and shared great observations. But the insights with the deepest understanding of the man came from Don McAdams, Paige’s fellow HISD board member, who later wrote a book about the district’s reform journey.
Particularly memorable was McAdams’s description of Paige as “a nerf ball with a core of steel.” By that he meant that Paige could appear endlessly flexible and malleable on surface-level matters, absorbing hits, allowing proposals to be squeezed and reshaped, taking political blows without flinching.
But in the end, the surface always returned to form, and the work kept spiraling toward the direction the man himself had chosen.
And at the center of it all was what McAdams believed to be Paige’s true superpower, the thing that distinguished him then, and distinguishes his legacy still:
Everything Rod Paige did was grounded in Vision and Belief.
A profound, multi-decade vision of a future better than the present.
An unwavering belief that such a future could be achieved.
And, most importantly, a belief rooted in other people’s capacity to make that future real.
Paige did not believe that the status quo would produce excellence.
He did not believe the district bureaucracy could will itself into transformation.
He did not believe that keeping control in the superintendent’s office was the path to equity or achievement.
He believed in people.
He believed in catalytic new leaders.
He believed in possibility.
And he nurtured the people and organizations that would bring that possibility to life.
McAdams told us that this Vision and Belief first found full expression in the document Paige helped draft shortly after joining the HISD board in 1990, A Declaration of Beliefs and Visions for the district.
That document, sadly not available anywhere online today, served as Paige’s North Star for the rest of his career.
Press accounts at the time …
… described the Declaration as calling for:
- Fundamental reform
- Autonomy for schools
- Site-based control over budgets
- Accountability for results
- A relentless focus on academic achievement
- And a commitment to closing historic achievement gaps
Four years later, the district needed new leadership. By then, Paige had proven himself not only the primary articulator of the district’s Beliefs and Visions but also their most visible champion. And so, in the middle of a public meeting, his colleagues surprised him by asking him to become superintendent.
There was some drama around the selection process. But the irrefutability of Paige’s leadership left the outcome never in doubt. Within months, his superintendency was widely seen as off to a strong start.
He engendered that momentum, not by hoarding power in the superintendent’s office, but by choosing instead to empower others to lead and begin building organizational capacity. Before the year was out, he made his first call to create a charter school in the district.
This was, mind you, before the State of Texas had even approved its charter school law!
So quite literally, CharterFolk, it is not an exaggeration or hyperbole to say:
Before there were charter schools, there was Rod Paige.
And once the state made it official, approving a charter school law within broader reform legislation …
… Paige made sure the district actively sought out Folk to open new schools.
Within a few years, Houston had as vibrant a charter school movement as any city in the country.
Yes, that Kelly Garrett pictured on A1 of the Houston Chronicle in spring 1997 is the same leader whose contributions we celebrated here at CharterFolk last year.
And yes, on Page 6, that’s Chris Barbic, who founded YES Prep and was inducted into the National Charter School Hall of Fame this year …
And yes, that’s Mike Feinberg, who would soon be known nationwide for co-founding KIPP with Dave Levin.
And on whose bumper did Feinberg and Levin plant themselves in the HISD parking lot, waiting hours to make a direct plea for facilities that would allow their fledgling program to grow?
Why, on Rod Paige’s, of course.
Before there was KIPP, CharterFolk.
Before there was YES Prep.
Before there was Harmony …
… whose success he continued to evangelize for decades thereafter …
Before there were literally thousands and thousands of charter schools …
… there was Rod Paige.
And in short order, he became a model for urban superintendents across the country. For my old boss Alan Bersin in San Diego, certainly, but also for leaders like Arne Duncan in Chicago, Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., Joel Klein in New York City, and countless others who saw in Houston a new blueprint for what courageous district leadership could look like. Like Paige before them, they encouraged charter schools to take root and grow in their own cities, helping to usher in the great flowering of charter school expansion and success that defined the early decades of our movement.
If only the spirit of Rod Paige existed in more superintendent offices across the country today.
Because without a superintendent in Houston at that moment who combined the moxie to challenge the status quo with the Vision and Belief to trust new leaders, the new programs that ultimately offered improved education to literally millions of students would never have even come into existence. It was Paige’s vision that saw what public education could become, and his belief in others that empowered the people who would make it so. And just as that nerf ball – bent, squeezed, pressured – always spiraled back toward the direction he had chosen, so too did the movement he set in motion. What we witnessed across Houston, across Texas, and across the nation was a spiraling force carried forward by a leader whose core of steel never wavered:
A Vision and Belief powerful enough to reshape the very trajectory of public education in our country.
Conclusion: The Deeper Meanings of NCLB
Of course, there is much more to Rod Paige’s story than what happened before NCLB. Some of his most inspiring work came after he served as Secretary of Education – his continued civic leadership, his return to Texas, even becoming president of his alma mater well into his eighties …
… demonstrating a staying power and purposefulness beyond what even the most compelling leaders ever achieve
Those stories deserve full telling, and I’ll leave them to others better positioned to do them justice.
For now, I want our world to understand something essential:
NCLB is not the best lens for understanding Rod Paige.
Or at least, it is not the only meaning those four letters can hold.
Others can, and should, bring greater context and nuance to the history of the federal law. But here, in the movement he helped set into motion long before Washington ever came calling, we should allow NCLB to carry meanings that more fully capture the contribution Rod Paige made to our movement and to public education across the country.
So let us advance three alternate meanings – the deeper meanings of NCLB – ones that better represent what truly defined Rod Paige:
Nothing Changes Lacking Belief – Paige’s vision was the North Star that guided not only his own life, but the reform efforts that ended up benefiting millions of students and families.
Nurturing Catalysts, Leadership & Building – His refusal to hoard power, and his choice instead to nurture the emergence of game-changing people and organizations able to deliver on his vision, became an example that others emulated across the country.
Never Ceased Leading Bravely – His courage to lead across the entirety of his remarkable, unrepeatable life created a legacy that will inspire others for generations to come.
Keeping these things front and center, CharterFolk, we extend to Rod Paige the honor and appreciation he so undoubtedly deserves.
And in so doing, we ensure that No Contribution is Left Belied, least of all the contribution of a man whose Vision and Belief helped set an entire movement in motion.