While gay leaders denounce President-elect Obama’s choice of inauguration speakers, namely right-wing evangelist Rick Warren, few seem to grasp that Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is good news.

Duncan, the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools, is the champion of a proposal in Chicago to open a Social Justice High School Pride Campus. He supported the idea, noting that national studies show GLBT youth are at greater risk of suicide, dropping out, and abuse and harassment from classmates. The (now postponed) plan was to base the school on the Harvey Milk High School in New York, which serves 99 gay and straight students and has an unparalleled 92 percent graduation rate. It would not have served GLBT students exclusively, but would instead specifically cater to GLBT students’ needs.

Having an ally heading the Department of Education (DOE) will mean GLBT students will be safer. The DOE is extremely powerful: The nation’s 15,000 public school districts and 5,000 public and private colleges depend upon federal funding, and the DOE stipulates that school districts that refuse to protect GLBT students can lose it. Simply defending an investigation by the Department’s Office of Civil Rights can cost a small fortune and ruin the careers of education professionals found to have acted wrongfully.

To date, no schools have lost funding due to having harassment charges brought against them. However, pressure to abide by the rules will increase once Duncan gets in.

Duncan will continue the legacy of William C. Riley, who headed the DOE during the Clinton Administration. Riley was a critical ally. He led an initiative to make schools safe for GLBT students by issuing directives to school authorities regarding how to protect and respond to abuse, bullying and harassment perpetrated by students on their peers. He also supported establishing student clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliances that now flourish in about 1,500 schools.

Unfortunately, Riley did not make such guidelines law. But the measures he instituted have paid off for students and for the GLBT community in other ways. For instance, our chief voting allies on gay rights are voters between18-35. In the Proposition 8 battle in California, 60 percent of voters between those ages voted against the measure; they are largely the product of schools where tolerance and respect for GLBT students have become the norm.

During the Bush years, neither Education Secretaries Rod Page nor Margaret Spellings showed disdain for the rights of GLBT students. Nor did they advance them or lead inquiries against schools charged with GLBT bias.

That has to change, and that’s where Duncan and his staff will play a key role.

His first move should be to appoint as general counsel California Assemblymember Sheila Kuehl, who championed GLBT students’ rights in the California Legislature. Next, he needs to issue regulations that inform schools of what they must do to meet minimum standards of tolerance and respect for all students, including GLBT students. He also needs to create procedures on the DOE’s website that enable GLBT students and their parents to complain about harassment incidents to the Office for Civil Rights.

Such measures are crucial given that only 11 states have laws protecting GLBT students and given continuing high rates of GLBT harassment in schools. For example, GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, in October, released what it calls “the most comprehensive report ever on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students,” the 2007 National School Climate Survey. The report contains the results of a survey of 6,209 middle and high school students. It finds that nearly nine out of 10 GLBT students (86.2 percent) experienced harassment at school in 2007, three-fifths (60.8 percent) felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation and about a third (32.7 percent) skipped a day of school in the month prior to the survey because they felt unsafe.