In nearly two decades as a community-college leader, Martha J. Kanter has earned acclaim for a strong record helping disabled and low-income students graduate from college and for her bold efforts to overhaul curricula to help more students master basic skills. Kanter has made such a mark as chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, that it seems everybody knows her personally, down to the local middle-school students who attend the district's mathematics-immersion classes each summer. After working for more than 30 years at nearly every level of the California community-college system, Kanter, widely known as Martha, was nominated by President Obama this month to be under secretary of education, the top postsecondary job at the U.S. Department of Education. If she is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as seems likely, she will achieve the highest rank of any former community-college official in the history of the department. Kanter, who is 60, has built a reputation as a leader who diligently nurtures personal connections with students and experiments with new ways to improve graduation and retention rates. Her work in the California system, the nation's largest, has focused on removing barriers to college attendance and graduation for low-income students, disabled students, and students learning English as a second language. Among the new approaches Kanter has undertaken in her six years as leader of Foothill-De Anza is a revised basic-skills curriculum in math that won statewide acclaim. She is also a nationally known champion of open educational resources, the effort to make college textbooks and other instructional materials available free online. As Kanter prepares for her move to Washington, she is already thinking about some of the practices she wants the federal government to encourage colleges to consider as the Obama administration makes its push to improve the nation's college-completion rates.