Jay Mathews

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Jay Mathews (born April 5, 1945, in Long Beach, California) is an author, education reporter and online columnist with the Washington Post. Mathews attended Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, California, Occidental and Harvard Colleges 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 column Class Struggles appears weekly on the online version of the Post.

Mathew'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 Advanced Placement Program (AP) studies to only the top students. His rating system for high schools, the Challenge Index, is used by the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine annually to rank U.S. high schools. Other books explore the Ivy League admissions system, and the growth of International Baccalaureate programs and their effect on academic improvement.

[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 Digital eBook
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

[edit] External links