The highly anticipated announcement of the next U.S. Secretary of Education brought varied reactions from three key African-American higher education constituencies and at least one Latino organization.

Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, which had offered up several names of Latinos to Obama’ transition team as potential education appointees, says he holds out hope that Duncan will look to some of those names, particularly for the slot of undersecretary that oversees higher education.

Flores said Duncan was “an excellent choice” since he will soon have to take up the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

“My sense is, in his work with the Chicago Public Schools, he has had some relationship with higher education institutions in Chicago,” Flores said. “I suspect he would be a good person to work with… I realized he might not have hands-on policy experience in terms of higher education, but Congress just passed the Higher Education Act this year, so that’s not something he’ll have to take up early.”

Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, was less gracious.

“NAFEO is disappointed,” said Baskerville. “We were supporting a number of compelling candidates including Dr. Belle Wheelan of the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities.”

Now the president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities, Wheelan was the Secretary of Education for the state of Virginia under former Governor Mark Warner and she was head of Virginia’s community college system.

Baskerville praised Wheelan for having a mix of pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher education experiences.

“At a time when we are losing 60 percent of African-American boys, the growing student populations are African-Americans as well as Latinos, and HBCUs continue to be the economic engines for the most distressed communities in the nation, it was my hope that we could have someone at the Department of Education that would signal the national priority to be placed on closing the achievement gaps, creating culturally sensitive educational opportunities for all students and pipeline them through diverse institutions.”