Thomas Toch is FutureEd's director. He is a former senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and director of the foundation’s Washington office. Toch 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, as a writer and co-managing editor. He spent a decade as an education correspondent 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 New Republic, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Monthly. He is the author of two books on American education, In the Name of Excellence and High Schools on a Human Scale.
Work by Thomas Toch

Don’t Abandon Standardized Testing; Rethink It
Thomas Toch Jan 25, 2021This appeared as a commentary piece in The Hill. Not surprisingly, the nation’s 13,300…

Reflections on Education Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona
Thomas Toch Jan 06, 2021Connecticut Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona’s remarks accepting Joe Biden’s nomination to become U.S. secretary of…

Strategies for the New Administration to Strengthen Public Education
Thomas Toch Nov 07, 2020Among the many challenges facing the Biden-Harris administration is the future of the nation’s public…

The Pandemic and the Teacher Pay Problem
Thomas Toch Sandi Jacobs Oct 06, 2020There have been countless headlines about the American education system’s struggles to educate 50…

How Covid-19 Could Doom the SAT and ACT
Thomas Toch Jul 16, 2020This initially appeared as a commentary piece in The Hill. One of the…

Tennessee’s School Voucher Law Gets What it Deserves
Thomas Toch May 19, 2020Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a school voucher law, permitting some of the state’s students…

Public School Choice Is Here to Stay. How Can We Make it Fair?
Thomas Toch Apr 20, 2020The leading Democratic presidential candidates — liberals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but also moderates…

Disrupted: The Path to School Reform in the Nation’s Capital
Thomas Toch Apr 02, 2020When the District of Columbia’s city councilors handed 36-year-old Mayor Adrian Fenty control of the…

What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Get About School Reform
Thomas Toch Jan 21, 2020Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently disparaged two decades of public school reform, in particular…

Retaining Teachers: The View from Washington, D.C.
Thomas Toch Dec 18, 2019FutureEd Director Thomas Toch testified before the District of Columbia City Council on Dec. 4…

Lessons in SEL from the California CORE Districts
Thomas Toch Oct 10, 2019This blog post was originally posted on CASEL’s Measuring SEL blog. Nearly a decade…

A New Lever for School Improvement: Student Surveys
Thomas Toch Raegen Miller May 28, 2019This commentary was initially published by RealClear Policy. The survey results shocked the staff…

Common Lotteries and the Future of Urban Public Education
Thomas Toch Mar 21, 2019New common enrollment systems permit families to select traditional public schools and charters using a single…

What a California School Survey Can Tell us About Measuring Social and Emotional Skills
Thomas Toch Raegen Miller Feb 25, 2019This post was initially published on OECD’s Education and Skills Today blog. Educators across…

Principals as Instructional Leaders
Thomas Toch Feb 25, 2019Research makes clear that effective school leaders are key to effective schools. Increasingly, that means…

CORE Lessons: Measuring the Social and Emotional Sides of Student Success
Thomas Toch Raegen Miller Feb 04, 2019The intensifying interest among education policymakers in the social and emotional dimensions of student success…

A Policymaker’s Playbook for Transforming Teaching
Thomas Toch Jun 05, 2018District of Columbia Public Schools has been a source of some sensational headlines over the past…

What Teacher Protests Can—And Can’t—Accomplish
Thomas Toch Jun 05, 2018The wave of teacher protests in the nation’s heartland are turning much-needed attention to the…

The Audacious Ambition of “A Nation at Risk”
Thomas Toch Jun 04, 2018It has been 35 years since a federally funded commission charted a bold new course…

Graduation Scandal Shouldn’t Overshadow DCPS Reforms
Thomas Toch Phyllis W. Jordan May 02, 2018The recent furor over District of Columbia high schools issuing dubious diplomas has …

Graduation Scandal Shouldn’t Overshadow DCPS Reforms
Thomas Toch Phyllis W. Jordan Feb 19, 2018The recent furor over District of Columbia high schools issuing dubious diplomas has …

Op-Ed: The Weakness in D.C.’s Voucher Program
Thomas Toch Phyllis W. Jordan Sep 04, 2017FutureEd Director Thomas Toch and Editorial Director Phyllis W. Jordan turned our report on…

The Facts About D.C.’s Teacher Reforms
Thomas Toch Aug 28, 2017Mark Simon, a longtime teacher union activist, argues in a recent Washington Post op-ed that…

Some New Teacher Evaluation Systems Do Make a Difference
Thomas Toch Jul 10, 2017When Education Next paired my recent article, “A New Era for…

A New Era for the Battle Over Teacher Evaluations
Thomas Toch Jul 07, 2017The Obama administration has worked hard to strengthen public-school teaching—a $400 billion-plus workforce,…

How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching
Thomas Toch May 30, 2017When most people think of school reform in the District of Columbia, they probably remember…

Measuring Teacher Performance More Meaningfully
Thomas Toch Apr 10, 2017For most of public education’s history, teacher evaluation was an after-thought. Despite the centrality of…

Parsing Betsy DeVos on the Education Budget
Thomas Toch Mar 20, 2017U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos greeted the release of President Donald Trump’s preliminary fiscal year…

Diane Ravitch’s Problematic Polemics
Thomas Toch Feb 28, 2017Diane Ravitch is a former education historian and federal education official who in recent years…

Grading the Graders: Teacher Evaluation Reform
Thomas Toch Feb 24, 2017Until recently, there was scant attention paid to teacher evaluation in American public education.