Jay Mathews is an author and education columnist with the Washington Post.

Career

edit

Mathews has worked at the Washington Post writing news reports and books about China, disability rights, the stock market, and education. 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.[1] [2] Top-performing schools are excluded. [3]

He previously held Bureau Chief posts at locations including Beijing, as its first Bureau Chief in 1979-1980, and Los Angeles. He spent several weeks back in Beijing in 1989 to cover the Tiananmen protests at the time,[4] and has since challenged the dominant media narrative of a student massacre inside Tiananmen Square, reporting that all remaining students at the square, were allowed to leave the square peacefully when soldiers arrived, and that instead hundreds of people, mostly workers and passersby did perish that night, "but in a different place and under different circumstances".[5]

Bibliography

edit
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

References

edit
  1. ^ "Education: How the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list works," The Washington Post April 19, 2015
  2. ^ Jay Matthews, "That’s the Idea: Some schools serving low-income students believe in a challenge" Washington Post April 12, 2016
  3. ^ "Public Elites List".
  4. ^ Jay Mathews, "Back to School in Beijing," Washington Post August 13, 1989
  5. ^ Jay Mathews, "The Myth of Tiananmen, And the Price of a Passive Press." Columbia Journalism Review Sept/Oct 1998
edit