all system. Innovation, leadership and citizenship, promoted and cultivated by the private schools in Canada, continues to be a reality that is grist for the public school system's PR mills also. Easily distorted as elitist. If about 6.5% of Canadian students are going to private schools, this type of tactical article may show how desperate the public educational system is getting. Wealthier parents at affluent area public school certainly can afford tutors, however this data has never actually been collected in Ontario that I know of. I was a board member of the Ontario provincial testing agency for several years in the early days of the EQAO. Each year parents would have to fill out a survey asking such questions as "do you read to your child?", "do you have a computer?", "how many books do you have at home?" -- that sort of thing. Never did they ask,"do you pay for tutoring?" I often requested that the agency try to gather data on this indicator as I knew that middle and upper class parents were using tutoring. Academic gains at schools could not be honestly evaluated without knowing the whole story. The EQAO would never do this because it would have likely been a bombshell. Schools often took credit for improvements when it was Kumon or Oxford that should have reaped the honours! Business for this form of private schooling has never been better. Who knows? Maybe the reason we have supposedly become the country with the best schools