Jay Mathews

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".