Greg Toppo, a former senior editor at Inside Higher Ed, was previously the national education reporter at USA Today from 2002 to 2018, and at The Associated Press from 2000 to 2002. He served as Education Writers Association president in 2017. He currently serves on the Spencer Education Fellowship Board.

Toppo is the author of two books on education, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), a book he researched and reported during his Spencer Fellowship year, 2011. His second book is The Trust Machine, co-authored with educator James Tracy, looking at how AI, automation and machine learning are changing the American high school (forthcoming in 2020 from MIT Press).

A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., Toppo taught in both public and private schools for eight years before moving into journalism. His first job was with the Santa Fe New Mexican, a 50,000-circulation daily. He worked for four years as a wire service reporter with the Associated Press, first in Baltimore and then in Washington, D.C., where he became the AP’s national K-12 education writer.

Greg lives west of Baltimore with his wife, Julie, and their two daughters.

Published  Work:

Investigative series on standardized tests

USAToday, March 2011