WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Chicago schools executive Arne Duncan as his education secretary at an event in the city today, transition aides said, and is expected to tap Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., to serve as secretary of the interior later this week, all but finalizing his selections for major Cabinet posts.

Obama plans to introduce Duncan at Dodge Renaissance Academy, a Chicago elementary school that the two visited together in 2005.

Duncan, 44, has been chief executive of the Chicago public schools since 2001, steering the nation's third-largest school district, which has more than 400,000 students. Duncan was raised in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from Obama's home, and is a longtime friend and basketball partner of the president-elect.

In 1998, Duncan joined the Chicago public school system, where he served as deputy chief of staff. Three years later, Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan chief executive.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings showered praise on the executive in an interview with The Washington Post last week.

"I do think he's a reform-oriented school leader who has been a supporter of No Child Left Behind and accountability concepts and teacher quality," she said. "He's a kindred spirit."

Although Obama has not detailed how he will try to fix the nation's struggling schools, he has promised to recruit an "army of new teachers," create better tests and give public schools more funding. The president-elect has not taken sides in a debate between reform advocates and powerful teachers unions, and choosing Duncan seems to be a consensus move likely to appeal to both.

The selection of Salazar is expected to be popular among environmental advocates. His confirmation would likely put the brakes on several controversial Interior Department decisions on energy development.

Yesterday, Obama formally rolled out the members of his climate change and energy team. Obama, vowing to address global warming and alternative energy sources, named Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary, Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Nancy Sutley as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and Carol M. Browner as assistant to the president for energy and climate change, a new post.