According to US media reports, President-elect Barack Obama has picked a hometown friend - Arne Duncan, Chicago schools' chief - as his education secretary. The formal announcement will come at a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday.

The newspaper said on its website that Duncan, 44, Chicago's top school official for seven years, has earned a reputation for addressing issues - he has overseen the closure of struggling schools, advocated merit pay for better teachers, and adopted a program to use private money to reward children for better grades.

Democrats who supported Duncan said that he has considerably improved student achievement, graduation rates and college-going rates in the nation's third-largest school system. He straddled two competing factions of the education community - the teachers unions, and a movement that favors accountability of schools and teachers, for students' performance.

Tom Loveless, an education expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, called Duncan a "safe choice. It reconciles the disagreements within the Democratic Party."

Obama's choice of Duncan comes at a time when the Education Department faces a debate next year over the reauthorization of President Bush's controversial education law - 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) - which mandates that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014, and requires that school systems show steady progress toward meeting that goal.

Calling for increased funding for NCLB programs, such as teacher training and better testing, Obama wants early-childhood education funding to be increased by about $10 billion annually. He has also said that a $4,000 annual tax credit would be provided to college students who perform 100 hours of community service.