Education warrior.(Scan)

In late 2000, when President Bush nominated Rod Paige as Secretary of Education, school reformers groaned. Paige, a former high school football coach who had risen to head the Houston Independent School District, was seen as a competent functionary--hardly the obvious candidate to make good on Bush's stirring promise to end "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

It didn't help that teachers' unions and education establishment insiders responded positively to news of Paige's nomination. When the massive No Child Left Behind Act was introduced, and Paige and the Bush team dropped private school vouchers altogether to gain Democratic support, many education reformers gave up on Secretary Paige.

But a funny thing has happened over the past three years: Rod Paige has become an education warrior. His urgency about failing public schools has been palpable in recent public comments. In the past months, be has branded the National Education Association a "coalition of the whining," and fought tenaciously for a Washington, D.C. vouchers bill. He has assembled a deft and capable team at the Department of Education, cleaning out a number of bureaucratic mossbacks from important mid-level posts.

This evolution runs directly counter to the Washington trend, in which hard-charging reformers gradually accommodate themselves to the system. Rod Paige has moved in the opposite direction.

What has driven Paige to become a crusader, it seems, is the near-universal "no" that has greeted Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. From every corner of the land has come a chorus of wails about the pressure the ...