It seems appropriate to me to kick this column off with something related to the recent election, and through the recent media buzz about who our next Secretaries of State and the Treasury shall be, I’d like to direct your attention to one of the more overlooked Cabinet posts — the Secretary of Education.Whoever takes the helm at the Department of Education will have a heavy burden to deal with right away. No Child Left Behind, for all the good intentions behind it, has inspired a culture of high-stakes testing and cutthroat competition for government funding that restricts true education and forces many schools to cut programs and cull students in order to continue operating. As President Bush might put it, our children isn’t learning, and it doesn’t help that Margaret Spellings, the current Secretary of Education, had never actually served as any sort of educator before being offered the job.

Two of the top names for the job are Arne Duncan, current CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and Joel Klein, current Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Both Duncan and Klein have made names for themselves as big-city reformers, appointed by popular mayors to work on modernizing and improving urban schools. Both, however, are also products of the corporate approach to education that No Child Left Behind represents.

Thankfully, Duncan and Klein aren’t the only choices. If Obama really is interested in progressive education policy, he’s got only one choice: Stanford professor and Obama campaign advisor Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond. An experienced educator and academic, she has done extensive research on teacher quality and educational equity, highly contentious issues after the reauthorization of NCLB, and she has worked on reforming teacher licensing and curriculum development. Her impressive résumé has already earned her the support of many reformers and professionals in the industry, and, given Obama’s stated commitment to excising political appointees from the federal government, she’s far and away the most qualified candidate for the post. Here’s hoping the President-elect will make the right decision.