Jay Mathews
American author and education reporter
title: "Jay Mathews" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["american-columnists", "1945-births", "living-people", "writers-from-long-beach,-california", "occidental-college-alumni", "harvard-college-alumni", "the-washington-post-people", "united-states-army-personnel-of-the-vietnam-war"] description: "American author and education reporter" topic_path: "geography/united-states" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Mathews" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary American author and education reporter ::
Jay Mathews is an author and education columnist with the Washington Post.
Career
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. Top-performing schools are excluded.
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, 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".
Bibliography
::data[format=table]
| Year | Title | Pages | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | One Billion | 448 | Ballentine | |
| 1985 | China and the U.S. | Foreign Policy Association | ||
| 1986 | Sino-American Relations After Normalization: Toward the Second Decade | 63 | Foreign Policy Association | |
| 1988 | Escalante: The Best Teacher in America | 322 | Henry Holt & Co. | |
| 1992 | A Mother's Touch: The Tiffany Callo Story | 265 | Henry Holt & Co. | |
| 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 | |
| 2003 | Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You | 304 | Three Rivers Press | |
| 2005 | Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools | 237 | Open Court | |
| 2009 | Work Hard. Be Nice. | 328 | Algonquin Books | |
| 2012 | "The War Against Dummy Math" | 140 | American Institutes for Research | |
| 2015 | "Question Everything" | 266 | Jossey-Bass | |
| :: |
References
References
- "Education: How the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list works," [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/how-americas-most-challenging-high-schools-works-the-selection-method/2015/04/14/cfdd9e44-e30a-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html ''The Washington Post'' April 19, 2015]
- Jay Matthews, "That’s the Idea: Some schools serving low-income students believe in a challenge" [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/americas-most-challenging-high-schools-2016/2016/04/12/325789a2-00d0-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html ''Washington Post'' April 12, 2016]
- "Public Elites List".
- Jay Mathews, "Back to School in Beijing," [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/08/13/back-to-school-in-beijing/1a1d7a07-668f-46b6-93fa-5b3e6e0d8691/ ''Washington Post'' August 13, 1989]
- Jay Mathews, "The Myth of Tiananmen, And the Price of a Passive Press." [https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php ''Columbia Journalism Review'' Sept/Oct 1998]
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