goldens,
Apple's education strategy is to build these templates in a variety of ways so that we can see all the different things that can be done with Pages. In the case of the education template, they chose to make the masthead color using the paragraph fill feature.
To start with click on View > Show Invisibles. Click to the left of the E in Education, and drag your cursor to the lower right corner of the header, so that you select the entire thing. Click on the Text Inspector > More button. At the bottom, you'll see a Paragraph Fill check box and a green color swatch. Click on that swatch, and a color pane opens. In the color pane, click on the little box of crayons (the icon on the right). Click on a crayon color you like. To the right of the magnifying glass, you see the large color swatch change color. Click on that large swatch, and drag it to the little swatch on the Text Inspector.
That ought to do it. If your text changes color, too, and it probably will, highlight it, then use the color palette to change the text color to whatever you want. Hope this helps.
-Dennis
