(Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

President-elect Barack Obama took playground basketball to new heights when he nominated Arne Duncan to become the next U.S. Secretary of Education.

Mr. Duncan, 44, is a veteran of the president-elect’s Chicago pickup hoop games, and he also is the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools.

Exactly how Mr. Duncan will approach the nation’s top education job, how closely his ideas track those of Mr. Obama and their prospects for success together still fall mainly in the realm of speculation. But Mr. Duncan’s career path and the opinions of his supporters and detractors offer some clues.

Mr. Duncan’s resume differs from that of the typical leader of an urban district. Most are educators with multiple degrees who have led itinerant professional lives, working a few years at one district then moving on to another. Mr. Duncan, on the other hand, is a Harvard graduate, but he didn’t go to graduate school. He never has worked as a teacher. His professional city-to-city travels were as a professional basketball player in Australia.

As for Mr. Duncan’s career in education, it has unfolded exclusively in Chicago, his home town. He spent several years directing a non-profit education group, then took a job as a deputy to Paul Vallas, the former head of the Chicago public school system. Two years later, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Mr. Duncan, at 37, to head the nation’s third-largest school district. Enrollment stands at 420,000 children.

Mr. Duncan is not an education ideologue. He has had time to understand a complex, rough and tumble education bureaucracy that serves a diverse community.

By such conventional measures as graduation rates and success in standardized testing, his record of leadership of the Chicago system is mixed, punctuated both by notable successes and persistent problems. The anecdotal record of his tenure — not universally held, by any means — is that he is smart and hands on and willing to try new things, that he hustles hard and has succeeded in getting resources for the school district.

Some critics complain that he approaches the job more from the standpoint of a pragmatic manager than an educator, but that may speak in Mr. Duncan’s favor. Urban districts pose huge administrative challenges, and poor management practices pose profound barriers to quality education. Helping schools better manage their resources — human and physical — is arguably the best use of the bully pulpit available to a federal secretary of education.

Ironically, Mr. Duncan’s potential value as education secretary may be conveyed most tellingly by detractors on the extremes of the education debate. For example, critics writing for a liberal blog called Truthout recently published a blistering critique of Mr. Duncan as a destroyer of traditional neighborhood schools and the teaching profession and a champion of charter schools and other “market based” approaches to education. Yet a conservative commentary distributed by the Heartland Institute complained that Mr. Duncan was appointed to coddle teachers and is timid about creating charter schools.

What may prove more important about Mr. Duncan’sS appointment is that it suggests education will move toward the top of the national agenda. Two top congressional figures in education — Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. George Miller, D-California — lauded his nomination. And, of course, his basketball-playing friend is Barack Obama.