Ted is an internationally known education writer and editor who has written informatively on topics ranging from American higher education to primary school reform in Cambodia, New Zealand and South Africa. Formerly the Education Editor of the New York Times, he is well known as the author of the best-selling Fiske Guide to Colleges (Sourcebooks), an annual publication that has been a standard part of college admissions literature for more than 25 years and is now the country’s best-selling college guide. A resident of Durham, North Carolina, Fiske serves on a number of boards of non-profit organisations working in the fields of access to college and international understanding. He is vice-chair of College for Every Students, based in Vermont, and he is chair of the Center for International Understanding, a public service programme of the University of North Carolina. He is a founding member of the board of the Central Park School for Children, a charter school in Durham.

Fiske has teamed up with his wife, Helen F. Ladd, who is Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University, on several major projects. In 1998 they were based at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, where, with support from a Fulbright Grant, they did research on that country’s experiment with parental choice and competition in the delivery of public education. In 2002 another Fulbright Grant took the couple to the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where they studied that country's efforts to create an equitable and democratic state education system in the post-apartheid era. They spent the first half of 2010 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands carrying out research on the Dutch system of weighted student funding for the financing of primary schools.