Former Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who is writing a book on the achievement gap and African-American leadership, has been elected to the board of trustees of an outspoken education think tank.
In addition to adding Mr. Paige as a trustee, the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is welcoming back Michael J. Petrilli, now a senior official in the Education Department’s office of innovation and improvement, who will return to the foundation in July as its vice president for national programs and policy.
“The government’s loss is our gain,” Chester E. Finn Jr., Fordham’s president and a former assistant secretary of education under President Reagan, said in a press release last week. Writing in the foundation’s electronic newsletter in November, just after Mr. Paige announced he would step down as secretary at the end of President Bush’s first term, Mr. Finn said the secretary “tirelessly barnstormed” for the 3-year-old No Child Left Behind law and implemented it with “conviction and steadfastness, occasionally nudging it toward a bit more flexibility and reasonableness.”
