Education Secretary Rod Paige says he once had a low view of federal workers. He now thinks better of them–perhaps at least partly because of reforms he instituted within his own agency. When he arrived in Washington in 2001, he found an Education Department wracked with charges of criminal fraud, waste and abuse. “The Ernst & Young report said you guys can’t count – you can’t reconcile your books,” he said. “Money was being lost. But all that has changed.” Indeed, crimes have been charged, and accountability procedures have been introduced. Not long ago, for only the second time in its quarter-century history, the department received a clean financial audit.

Cleaner government is no mean achievement. But as he made clear in a recent interview, the former Houston school superintendent hardly is content with that. He has substantive goals to achieve, and they are ambitious.