President-Elect Obama has named his Secretary of Education and to no one’s surprise he picked Arne Duncan, the chief of the Chicago school system. Duncan has a reputation both as a reformer and as friendly to teachers’ unions. Whether that means he takes the best from each and uses them for the betterment of the students or he’s a politically-adroit fence-straddler remains to be seen.

Duncan is, however, a proponent of the “Everyday Math” curriculum which is, so far as I can tell, makes students significantly more innumerate while making them feel ten kinds of good about how stupid they really are. Duncan has also worked very closely with the Annenberg Challenge, which is the educational program on which Barack Obama and cop-killer scumbag Bill Ayers worked as partners for many years.

The P-E could have make a better pick, but he could also have done worse. In the end, I don’t believe that the Federal government has any business with local school systems, so I’m not fond of any Secretary of Education no matter who it is.