Private schooling, and the private schools that survive and thrive, even in rough economic times, are schools that adapt to their needs of their students, and not having the students adapt to the needs of the adults. To use China or any other country for that matter without using the numbers from the ground, and not the top numbers such as GDP is the ploy that is used to defend the teaching practices and policies of a centralized system or model. Sure Canada, from the top appears to decentralized, but each provincial model has a strong centralized model, where the practices, policies, and power divisions provides the adults to run their pet theories based on the SEC factors, and water-downed practices concerning the individual needs of the students. All it does, it increases expenditures, to put out the many small fires of inequity of the individual student as well as increasing expenditures to maintain the equity policies that are for the most part control the social-status of the students. In China, and in other countries, the same things happen where the lower the social-status, the less apt an individual or a group of individuals will be on the same levels on reading, writing and numeracy as those with a higher social-status. China is a very poor example Doug, but than again, insiders within education, think that most or us outside looking in, are not capable of understanding, and very much like politicians who come up with the excuse from time