056 Greg Toppo of Inside Higher Ed and The Game Believes in You

Greg Toppo is a senior editor for Inside Higher Ed. Before that, he spent 15 years as the national education reporter for USA Today. A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., he 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. Toppo also co-led the USA Today team that in 2011 looked at educator-led cheating on standardized tests. The paper’s series prompted the Washington, D.C., inspector general to investigate high erasure rates in D.C. schools. Toppo was a 2010 Spencer fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a 2016 Yale University Poynter Fellow. He is the author of the book The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (April 2015). In 2017, he became president of the Education Writers Association.