Updated: 1:00 pm ET

(Chicago, Illinois) President-elect Barack Obama Tuesday tapped Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan to become secretary of education.

As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the 44-year-old has focused on improving struggling schools and closing those that fail – a policy that has sometimes put him at odds with parents and the teachers union.

Obama highlighted Duncan’s approach by choosing a Duncan turnaround story, Dodge Renaissance Academy, as the backdrop for Obama’s formal announcement Tuesday. Duncan closed the perennial test score cellar-dweller 2002 and then reopened it with new staff, an overhauled curriculum and more teacher training. Within years, test scores at the school soared.

Duncan is seen as gay-positive.

This fall he supported an LGBT high school for Chicago. Called the Social Justice High School: Pride Campus, the plan was put on hold last month following opposition from conservatives and concerns by some members of the LGBT community.

The plan is being reworked and is expected to be taken up next year.

Under the original plan, the school was to open in 2010 and eventually serve 600 students, about half of whom were expected to identify as gay. 

Its mission statement said it would serve “the underserved population of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning youth and their allies.”

That has been replaced by one that offers protections for students regardless of “orientation,” but doesn’t mention sexuality. Instead, the Solidarity school aimed to address “citywide concerns over violence, bullying and harassment.”

As opposition to the original plan mounted and concerns were raised by some gay activists that the school would segregate gay young people, Duncan stepped back.

“If we’re going to have a separate high school, let’s put the bullies in the high school, not the (gay) kids,” Rick Garcia, political director for the gay rights group Equality Illinois said last month.

In announcing Duncan’s nomination, Obama called him “the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners.” 

“He’s not beholden to any one ideology, and he’s worked tirelessly to improve teacher quality,” Obama said.

But some Chicago teachers said they were disappointed with Obama’s pick.

“I don’t believe Mr. Duncan’s model is a model for America,” said Deborah Lynch, a teacher at Gage Park High School and a president of the Chicago Teachers Union from 2001-2004.

Lynch criticized Duncan’s strong advocacy for charter schools, which tens of thousands of Chicago students now attend. She accused him of dismantling of the public school system on which so many poor children depend.

Duncan majored in sociology at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987.

After graduating, Duncan played professional basketball for four years in Australia, where he also worked with children who were wards of the state.

Duncan ran an education nonprofit on Chicago’s South Side before working in Chicago Public Schools under former chief Paul Vallas, now the schools chief in New Orleans.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Duncan is expected to be less polarizing than Bush secretary Margaret Spellings.

Spellings has promoted abstinence-only education in the nation’s schools, despite concerns that it ignores gay sex issues.

The federal government spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education.

A study mandated by Congress last year found that students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex within a few years as those who did not.

The study, by Mathematica Policy Research, also found that students who attended the abstinence classes reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes, and they first had sex at about the same age as their control group counterparts – 14 years and nine months.

A report a year earlier by the Society of Adolescent Medicine found that abstinence-only education was “unlikely to meet the health needs” of gay students because abstinence-only programs focus heavily on no sex until marriage and ignore homosexuality. This could lead to increased risk of infection among these youngsters, the investigators said.

Sixteen states have declined to take part in the federal program.

In 2005, on her second day on the job, Spellings issued a scathing attack on an episode of the PBS children’s series “Postcards from Buster” for featuring a same-sex couple.

In a letter to  Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of PBS, Spellings issued a veiled threat of funding cuts if the network did not pull the show. 

“Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television,” Spellings said in the letter. 

She also suggested that PBS to consider refunding the money it spent on the episode.

The episode was dropped by the network.