At Ronald D. O’Neal Elementary School, in Elgin, Illinois, none of the third graders could read and write at grade level according to state tests in 2019. Nearly 90 percent of the school population is considered low-income and nearly three-quarters are labeled English learners, meaning that the state language arts test assesses their reading and […]
Author Archives: Tara García Mathewson
Tara García Mathewson is a staff writer. She launched her journalism career with two award-winning pieces co-produced during a three-month stint at the Kitsap Sun in Bremerton, WA. After graduating with honors from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she joined the staff of the Daily Herald, Illinois’ third largest newspaper, where she covered city government and education in Chicago’s suburbs. There she was on a team that earned a Chicago Headline Club Lisagor Award for a series tied to the 40th anniversary of Title IX. García Mathewson left the daily grind of newspapers to spread her wings as an independent journalist, covering national education issues, immigration policy, Chicago’s Latino business community and more. She received the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Equal Voice Journalism Fellowship in 2014 and the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship in 2017. García Mathewson lives in Boston. She grew up in rural Western New York, where she and her sister once waited for the bus for a very long time in more than a foot of snow because it didn’t occur to her family that school might be canceled.
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