Amy Bennett McIntosh, the wife of former CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, is spending this fall at the University of Southern California, teaching undergraduates how education policy gets made. From 2004 to 2017 she held government education jobs in New York and Washington. The last was at the U.S. Education Department, where she rose to acting assistant secretary in charge of policy and budget under President Obama. Before that she spent 20 years in business, including a stint as chief executive of the restaurant guide Zagat.
She and Toobin are both fellows this semester at USC’s Center for the Political Future, and his study group on law and politics meets right after hers on Tuesday afternoons. They have been married for 40 years.
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Quick facts about Amy McIntosh
| Fact | Details |
|---|---|
| Full name | Amy Bennett McIntosh (Amy McIntosh professionally) |
| Born | 1958 (turns 68 in 2026) |
| Hometown | Cincinnati |
| Education | Harvard College, economics, 1980; Harvard Business School, MBA, 1984 |
| Known for | Zagat Survey CEO, 2000 to 2002; acting assistant secretary, U.S. Education Department, 2015 to 2017 |
| Spouse | Jeffrey Toobin, married May 31, 1986 |
| Children | Ellen and Adam, both adults |
| Now | Fall 2026 fellow, USC Center for the Political Future |
Early years in Cincinnati and at Harvard
McIntosh grew up in Cincinnati and was valedictorian of Indian Hill High School’s class of 1976. Her father, Robert C. McIntosh, was a Cincinnati lawyer, and her mother, Nancy Drysdale, ran art galleries in Washington until 1996.
At Harvard, McIntosh studied economics and became an associate managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, where she met Toobin. He was two years behind her. After graduating in 1980 she spent two years at the consulting firm Bain & Company, then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1984.
From American Express to Zagat
American Express hired McIntosh out of business school, and she left in 1995 as senior vice president of marketing for its consumer card group. She moved to the regional phone company NYNEX, which merged with Bell Atlantic in 1997. A year later Bell Atlantic put her in charge of its consumer internet business as it launched high-speed DSL service.
In October 2000 Zagat Survey named her its first chief executive. That February the company had raised $31 million from investors led by General Atlantic and Kleiner Perkins as it expanded onto the web and cell phones. Co-founder Tim Zagat said her “marketing savvy and technology depth” would help it keep growing.
By her own account, she refocused Zagat on its profitable publishing business as the dot-com bust deepened, then left in early 2002. That summer she joined Dun & Bradstreet as a senior vice president.
Leaving business for New York’s schools
“I’m now 20 years into the private sector, I’m commuting to New Jersey, I’m selling D&B credit reports,” McIntosh said in a 2024 podcast with Barbara Apple Sullivan, describing her life in 2004.
“And my form of a midlife crisis was, ‘I think I need to be more deeply invested in what I do every day than I currently am.'”
Education had been her side interest since 1996, when she became the first chair of Teach For America’s New York City board. “So, I decided to switch my hobby for my day job,” she said.
In October 2004 she became deputy chief of staff to Joel Klein, then chancellor of New York City’s public schools. In 2006 the school system made her its chief of talent and new initiatives, responsible for recruiting and keeping effective teachers and principals.
In 2010, soon after New York won federal Race to the Top money, McIntosh joined the state education department’s Regents Research Fund, a privately funded team that advised the education commissioner. Her résumé says she led the drafting of New York’s first statewide rules for rating teachers and principals. The City University of New York, which hired her in 2017, credited her with starting a grant program for career ladders and extra pay for top teachers. Awards went to 221 districts and 42,000 teachers.
Tying teacher ratings to student test scores set off a statewide backlash. By 2015 about one in five eligible students were skipping the state’s math and English exams, Chalkbeat reported. That December, two years after McIntosh left for Washington, the Board of Regents voted to keep state test scores out of teacher ratings until 2019.
Three years at the U.S. Education Department
McIntosh joined the Education Department in January 2014 as principal deputy assistant secretary for preschool through 12th-grade policy, the No. 2 job in its policy office. In March 2015 she took over that office, the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, as acting assistant secretary.
CUNY’s announcement listed two efforts from her first federal job: a requirement that every state plan how to give poor and minority students better access to excellent teachers, and Preschool Development Grants meant to expand state-funded preschool in 18 states. It also said she developed two annual department budgets of about $78 billion in discretionary funding.
President Obama nominated her for the permanent job in April 2016. The Senate education committee never held a hearing, and on Jan. 3, 2017, the Senate sent the nomination back with dozens of other unconfirmed Obama picks.
After Washington: CUNY, NYU and corporate boards
In mid-2017 McIntosh started at CUNY as associate vice chancellor for academic strategy, and for a year she was also chief of staff to its interim chancellor. In 2019 she became an education consultant and joined the board of EAB, an education technology company. She had advised PowerSchool, a maker of school software, since 2017 and joined its board when it went public in 2021, staying until 2024. The company’s 2022 proxy statement shows it paid her $250,000 in cash and stock for 2021.
NYU’s School of Professional Studies, one of her consulting clients, hired her as chief marketing officer in 2023. “Returning to my marketing roots but now in higher education,” she posted when she took the job. After leaving in February 2026, she called the NYU job “a wonderful final career chapter.” Her LinkedIn profile now says she is devoting her time to private-sector and nonprofit boards.
Forty years married to Jeffrey Toobin
When The New York Times announced the engagement in January 1986, it used her full name, Amy Bennett McIntosh. They married on May 31, 1986, a week before Toobin graduated from Harvard Law School. The wedding notice said she would keep her name.
The couple have two adult children, Ellen and Adam, and two grandchildren. Her USC biography says she lives in New York City with Toobin and “Breezy the Labradoodle.”
In 2009 and 2010 the New York Daily News reported on Toobin’s long affair with lawyer Casey Greenfield, who gave birth to his son in 2009. A DNA test, done as part of Greenfield’s suit for child support, confirmed he was the father.
In October 2020 The New Yorker, where Toobin had been a staff writer since 1993, suspended him after he exposed himself during a Zoom call with colleagues. Toobin said in a statement:
“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”
The magazine fired him the next month. CNN, where he had been a legal analyst since 2002, brought him back in June 2021, and he left the network in August 2022.
McIntosh has not commented publicly on either episode. After he became a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times in 2025, she posted on LinkedIn, “Proud of my husband’s new gig.” Sharing an Atlantic review of The Pardon, his 2025 book on presidential pardons, she wrote, “Read this book for more. (Yes by my husband).”
This fall at USC
McIntosh’s study group, “Changing Student Lives Through Educational Policy,” is a non-credit course for undergraduates that meets Tuesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. through Nov. 10. Her fellow page says students will look at where school money comes from and where it goes, and will work together on “their own policy proposals for the future of California and beyond.”
She also appeared with Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s education school, and Marshall Tuck, a former candidate for California schools chief, on a panel at the center about which education reforms are working.
The Education Department she once helped run has lost nearly half its staff since 2024, falling from about 4,200 employees to roughly 2,300, NPR reported in May.
This spring McIntosh shared a Washington Monthly article praising a “do no harm” test in the tax and spending law Trump signed in July 2025. Under the test, undergraduate programs will lose access to federal student loans if their graduates earn less than typical workers aged 25 to 34 in their state who have only a high school diploma. The article traced the idea partly to the Obama administration’s gainful employment rule. McIntosh called the test “one education policy the Trump administration got more or less right, maybe by accident.”
