Thomas Toch, Education Sector's co-founder, is the executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington (AISGW), and a leading national voice on education policy.

At AISGW, a consortium of 85 independent schools educating 34,700 students in the Washington, D.C., region, Toch leads a team that supplies data and sponsors programs for its schools on a wide range of topics, builds professional networks, and is a highly regarded voice for independent education and a source of expertise on independent school issues in the Washington region and beyond. Toch also writes the "Washington View" column for Kappan magazine.

Before moving to AISGW in 2009, Toch served as co-director of Education Sector, an independent, Washington, D.C.-based think tank that he co-founded. Toch helped shape the organization's strategic vision, recruited its senior staff, provided editorial and fundraising leadership, and authored several of the organization's major reports.

Toch also has spent three years as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And he has authored two books on American education, In the Name of Excellence (Oxford University Press) and High Schools on a Human Scale (Beacon Press).

Toch helped launch Education Week in the 1980s, serving variously as writer, commentary editor, and co-managing editor at the newspaper. He has been a writer-in-residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy and at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

He spent a decade as the senior education correspondent 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 twice has been nominated for National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Toch has been a guest commentator on education on programs ranging from the ABC Nightly News to Good Morning America, the CBS Morning News, Bloomberg TV, CNN, C-SPAN, Frontline, and National Public Radio.

He is a graduate of Kenyon College and has a master's degree in English from the University of Toronto. Early in his career he taught English at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. He lives with his family in Maryland.

He can be reached at ttoch@aisqw.org, or (202) 625-9223.