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 College and Harvard College. He is a Vietnam veteran.

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.

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 the Washington Post’s website as the High School Challenge. Mathews’s other books explore the growth of International Baccalaureate programs, the Ivy League admissions system and the rise of the KIPP charter schools.

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