Jay Mathews

Jay Mathews (born April 5, 1945, in Long Beach, California) is an author and education columnist with the Washington Post.

Early life

Mathews attended Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California, Occidental College and Harvard College. He is a Vietnam veteran, having served in the US Army.

Career

Mathews has worked at the Washington Post since 1971, writing news reports and books about China, disability rights, the stock market, and education. Mathews won the 1999 Benjamin Fine Award for Outstanding Education Reporting for both features and column writing. He writes the Class Struggle blog for the Washington Post.

He has prepared the annual ranking of "America’s Most Challenging High Schools" for the Washington Post (and previously for Newsweek) for 18 years. He developed the "challenge index" by counting how many individuals take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests at a school each year, divided by the number of graduating seniors. Top-performing schools are excluded.

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 criticizes the selection process that offers Advanced Placement studies to only the top students. His national ranking system for high schools, the Challenge Index, formerly in Newsweek, runs on the Washington Post website, as the High School Challenge. His other books explore the growth of International Baccalaureate programs, the Ivy League admissions system and the rise of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools.

Family

He and his wife, Linda Mathews, former Los Angeles Times Beijing correspondent and assistant foreign editor, New York Times national editor, ABC News producer and USA Today enterprise editor, have three children. His son, Joe Mathews, is an author, journalist and syndicated columnist at Zocalo Public Square, and his daughter-in-law, Anna Wilde Mathews, is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

Bibliography

Year	Title	Pages	Publisher	ISBN
1985	One Billion	448	Ballentine	ISBN 0345298950
1985	China and the U.S.		Foreign Policy Association	ISBN 0871240947
1986	Sino-American Relations After Normalization: Toward the Second Decade	63	Foreign Policy Association	ISBN 0871241056
1988	Escalante: The Best Teacher in America	322	Henry Holt & Co.	ISBN 0805011951
1992	A Mother's Touch: The Tiffany Callo Story	265	Henry Holt & Co.	ISBN 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	Times Books	ISBN 0812931408
2003	Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You	304	Three Rivers Press	ISBN 0761536957
2005	Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools	237	Open Court	ISBN 0812695771
2009	Work Hard. Be Nice.	328	Algonquin Books	ISBN 9781565125162
2012	"The War Against Dummy Math"	140	American Institutes for Research	ISBN 1456340115
2015	"Question Everything"	266	Jossey-Bass	ISBN 9781118438190

External links

• Class Struggle online column
• Waiting For Superman Debate
• Appearances on C-SPAN