Word: rod
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...When Rod Paige first took the helm of the struggling Houston public schools seven years ago, Gayle Fallon, president of the local teachers' union, blasted him as "the most antiteacher superintendent we've had in the past decade." By the end of Paige's tenure last month, however, Fallon was giving a far different testimonial. She gushed that Paige "will leave a better district than he came to" and that "he'll be a very effective Secretary of Education...
...Rod Paige has come a long way from where he grew up: the hamlet of Monticello, in the piney woods of south-central Mississippi. His dad was a school principal and a barber, his mother a librarian. Paige was the oldest of five children, all of whom have graduate degrees. "My parents told us the solution to the world's problems was education," says Paige...
...left in charge when his parents were out at the evening meetings their jobs often required. "Rod would make us listen to him read," remembers his youngest sister Raygene Paige, retired from a state agricultural agency. "And if we didn't pay attention to him, we had to write a book report...
...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...
...racist character assassin; he greeted Colin Powell, who had sailed through his own hearing, and as singer Kim Weston began the black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, the men were joined by Katherine Harris, late of Tallahassee, Fla. "Stony the road we trod,/Bitter the chastening rod,/Felt in the days when hope unborn had died," goes the anthem. "Yet with a steady beat,/Have not our weary feet,/Come to the place for which our fathers sighed...