Roderick Paige discovers a way to be noticed

While I can admit that President Bush’s cabinet has some capable, professional public officials, the truth is Education Secretary Roderick Paige just isn’t one of them.

The Washington Post, for example, reported today on an interview Paige did with the “news” service for the Southern Baptist Convention. While Paige said a variety of unobjectionable things about the importance of faith in his personal life in the interview, he raised eyebrows by saying, “All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith, where a child is taught that there is a source of strength greater than themselves.”

Now there are a couple of different ways to interpret this remark. He could have meant that he’d like to see public schools abandon official neutrality on religion and being promoting his Christian principles, so, in his words, children will be “taught to have a strong faith.” If this is what he meant, it’s troubling because as the nation’s top educator, he probably shouldn’t be encouraging educators to ignore the First Amendment and federal law regarding religion in public schools.

Or perhaps he meant something else. Paige could have been trying to say that private Christian schools are the ideal place for parents to send their children because these institutions have “a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community.” This, too, would be an odd thing for the Secretary of Education to say, since it’s his primary responsibility to promote and improve America’s public schools, not advocate that families turn to away from public schools in favor of parochial schools.

Unfortunately, Paige wasn’t done there. Paige went on to say to Christian schools are more successful that their public counterparts because of a “strong value system,” and appeared to criticize public schools by concluding, “In a religious environment the value system is set. That’s not the case in a public school where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values.”

The Post asked Paige press secretary to elaborate and explain what the secretary meant by his remarks. “The quotes are the quotes,” the aide said cryptically.

My friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who I have a hunch alerted the Post to this story, didn’t seem to appreciate Paige’s remarks. Barry Lynn, the group’s executive director (and a friend of Carpetbagger) said, “Our public schools serve children from varied religious backgrounds. As our nation’s top educator, Dr. Paige should celebrate religious diversity, not denigrate it.” Lynn added, “Religious pluralism strengthens our nation; it doesn’t weaken it. If Dr. Paige does not understand this, he should resign.”

If this is the first time you’re really hearing Roderick Paige’s name, don’t feel bad. Paige, in the course of his tenure, has earned the reputation of being one of the least important members of Bush’s cabinet and easily the most ignored education secretary since the post was created.

Six months into Bush’s term as president, as the administration was putting the finishing touches on its huge education bill, Paige was intentionally left completely out of the loop. In June 2001, White House education aide Sandy Kress, who does most of the president’s heavy lifting on education, told the Wall Street Journal that Paige was “a little bit on the periphery.”

This was an understatement. Paige was clueless and couldn’t even explain the basic details of the president’s education plan when asked by reporters or members of Congress. As The New Republic noticed in July 2001, “[A]t times Paige has seemed painfully unaware of both the policy and the politics behind the massive education reform effort he ostensibly oversees.” Even a Republican House staffer remarked, “People realized that [Paige] was outside of the process. I don’t think anyone thought that he was really involved.”

Paige’s reputation for incompetence only got worse as the year went on. Paige told audiences that the administration was going to fight for private school vouchers while administration officials were dropping voucher proposals from the education bill. Paige would tell people that the administration saw no need to increase federal education funding, only to discover that the president was agreeing to Democrats’ demands to do just that.

At one point, conservative political columnist Robert Novak wrote a column that concluded Paige “disliked” the very education bill the administration was asking him to defend.

I doubt very much that Paige will take Barry Lynn’s advice and step aside. Then again, I’m not sure anyone would notice if Paige left.