Tom Loveless is a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is also a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. He researches education policy and reform and is author of The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (1999) and editor of several books, most recently Lessons Learned: What International Assessments Tell Us about Math Achievement (2007). Loveless authors the annual Brown Center Report on American Education, a publication featuring three studies.

Loveless's teaching experience includes nine years as a sixth-grade teacher in California and seven years as assistant and associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Loveless represents the United States in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and from 2006 to 2008 served on the President's National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Loveless received a Ph.D. in education from the University of Chicago in 1992.