Tom Loveless is an education researcher and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 2000-2017, he authored The Brown Center Report on American Education, an annual report analyzing important trends in education. Loveless has published widely in scholarly journals and appeared in popular media to discuss school reform, student achievement, and other education topics.

Loveless holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in special education from California State University, Sacramento, and an A.B., in English from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1979-1988, Loveless was a classroom teacher in the San Juan Unified School District, near his hometown of Sacramento, California. After receiving a Ph.D. in 1992, Loveless joined the faculty of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he served as both assistant and associate professors of public policy from 1992-1999. He joined Brookings in 1999, serving as a senior fellow in Governance Studies, 1999-2014, and as Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, 1999-2008.