Paige discussed his own experience growing up in racially segregated Mississippi, claiming that the experience continues to inform his educational outlook.
“I wonder whether anyone who has not lived through segregation can imagine how horrible it was,” he said. “You knew first-hand that anything you did was wrong.”
Paige, who had to travel north to be enrolled in a graduate program, said he remembered exactly where he was when he first heard about the Brown decision.
Still, he said, segregation did not immediately disappear—leaving many of the inequity problems that the No Child Left Behind attempts to address today.
“We have a long way to go,” he said. “And education is the battlefront.”
Last night, Paige declined to comment on his description of the National Education Association—which spoke against No Child Left Behind—as a “terrorist organization” at February meeting of state governors.
—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.