Jay Mathews
Jay Mathews (born April 5, 1945, in Long Beach, California) is an author, education columnist and blogger with the Washington Post. Mathews attended Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California, Occidental and Harvard College and is a Vietnam veteran. He started at the Post in 1971, writing news reports and books about China, disability rights, the stock market, and several educational topics. Mathews won the 1999 Benjamin Fine Award for Outstanding Education Reporting for both features and column writing. His Class Struggle blog is on washingtonpost.com. He writes at least two columns a week for the newspaper.
Mathews's book Escalante: The Best Teacher in America traces Jaime Escalante's career from his native Bolivia to Garfield High School in East Lost Angeles, where he taught advanced mathematics courses to disadvantaged high school students, mostly Latino. Escalante's story was the subject of the film Stand and Deliver, which starred Edward James Olmos.
Class Struggle: What's Wrong (and Right) with America's Best Public High Schools, was published in March 1998. It explored elite American public high schools and criticized the selection process that offers Advanced Placement Program (AP) studies to only the top students. His national ranking system for high schools, the Challenge Index, formerly in Newsweek, runs on washingtonpost.com as the High School Challenge. Other books explore the growth of International Baccalaureate programs, the Ivy League admissions system and the rise of the KIPP charter schools.
He and his wife Linda Mathews, former New York Times national editor, ABC news producer and USA Today enterprise editor, have three children. One son, Joe Mathews, is also a journalist doing books, articles and events on California affairs and is married to Wall Street Journal reporter Anna Wilde Mathews.
[edit] Published works
| Year | Title | Pages | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | One Billion | 448 | Ballentine | 0345298950 |
| 1985 | China and the U.S. | Foreign Policy Association | 0871240947 | |
| 1986 | Sino-American Relations After Normalization: Toward the Second Decade | 63 | Foreign Policy Association | 0871241056 |
| 1988 | Escalante: The Best Teacher in America | 322 | Henry Holt & Co. | 0805011951 |
| 1992 | A Mother's Touch: The Tiffany Callo Story | 265 | Henry Holt & Co. | 0805017143 |
| 1998 | The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press | 12 | Columbia Journalism Review | |
| 1998 | Class Struggle : What's Wrong (and Right) with America's Best Public High Schools | 320 | Three Rivers Press | 0812931408 |
| 2003 | Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You | 304 | Three Rivers Press | 0761536957 |
| 2005 | Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools | 237 | Open Court | 0812695771 |
| 2009 | Work Hard. Be Nice. | 328 | Algonquin Books | 9781565125162 |
