Greg Toppo, a former senior editor at Inside Higher Ed, was previously the national education reporter at USA Today from 2002-2018, and at The Associated Press from 2000 to 2021. He served as Education Writers Association president from 2017 to 2021. He currently serves on the Spencer Education Journalism 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, 2010 to 2011. His second book is Running with Robots: The American High School’s Third Century, co-authored with educator James Tracy, looking at how AI, automation and machine learning are changing the American high school (MIT Press, 2021).
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. From 2020 to 2021, he taught journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar.
Greg lives west of Baltimore with his wife, Julie.