Thomas Toch

Thomas Toch is director of FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He is a former senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and director of the foundation’s Washington office. He is a founder and former co-director of the think tank Education Sector, a former guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Toch helped launch Education Week in the 1980s, first as a writer and then as the publication's co-managing editor. He spent a decade as a writer and editor at U.S. News and World Report and has contributed to The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Monthly. His work has twice been nominated for National Magazine Awards. He’s the author of two books on American education, "In the Name of Excellence" and "High Schools on a Human Scale."

Posts By Thomas Toch

Poverty

A Raise Is Nice, But Teachers Have an Opportunity to Fight for Something Even Bigger

The wave of teacher protests in the nation's heartland are turning much-needed attention to the desperately under-resourced public school systems of many states. But the strikes and demonstrations...

Read More

U.S. Department of Education

Here's the Deal: We Can't Help Teachers Improve If We Don't Know What Needs Improving

In an unexpected defense of the Obama administration's pursuit of a clearer teacher-by-teacher picture of who's doing a good job educating the nation's students and who isn't, the U.S. Department of...

Read More

Teaching

How Meaningful Teacher Evaluation Systems Help Improve the Teacher Pipeline

Teacher evaluation reform, improving schools’ measurement of who is doing a good job in classrooms and who isn’t, has been nothing if not controversial in public education in recent years. But there...

Read More