Thomas Toch is the founding director of FutureEd, a nonpartisan policy center 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 a founder and former co-director of the think tank Education Sector. Toch was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He helped launch Education Week and served as the publication’s co-managing editor. He was 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 Washington Post Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, and other national publications. He is the author of two books on American education, In the Name of Excellence and High Schools on a Human Scale. Toch was named one of Washingtonian magazine’s 500 most influential policymakers of 2024 and 2025.