About

Tara García Mathewson is working on a book about bilingual education as a 2025-26 Spencer Education Reporting Fellow at Columbia University. She has been writing about schools for more than a decade, first as a local reporter in Chicago’s northwest suburbs and then nationally. Her reporting has informed local and statewide policy as well as academic research and helped parents and educators better serve and advocate for the children in their care.

Tara has been recognized for her beat reporting as well as features and investigations into the educational technology industry, school discipline, bilingual education and other topics. Her work has appeared in a variety of regional and national news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, USA Today, and Wired.

Before becoming a Spencer Fellow, Tara was an investigative reporter at The Markup and CalMatters, two nonprofit newsrooms that merged in 2024. She previously spent six years at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom focused on innovation and inequality in education, where she explored the “Future of Learning” in K-12 schools and helped establish an investigative team.

She grew up in rural western New York and studied journalism and sociology at Northwestern University. She speaks English and Spanish and lives in New York City.

Résumé.