This is a phenomenal article that explains why the writer decided to leave China, which he loved.
This was one important reason:
Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.
The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.
The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The high school where my wife teaches has an interesting international program, which hosts mainly Chinese students. Their families send them here at great expense to benefit from our “failing” US schools. One thing that is striking about these kids is their inability to deal with interpretive and analytical questions when asked. They have suffered mightily under a standardized, test-prep curriculum, which had deemphasized critical thinking.
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I talked to some new Chinese grad students last Thanksgiving, and they said the same thing. They studied for the test, and then did nothing. I had heard that before. The wealthy Chinese parents are now sending their children here for college. But there is a cultural problem in the classes here.
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There seems to be no mention here about the cultural discrimination in China’s urban schools. Shanghai has been thrown up as the model for improving American schools.
But, a University of Washington professor of geography pointed out that Shanghai schools, as well as the other urban Chinese schools, refuse to admit the children of the Chinese immigrant (rural to urban) workers into high school. If those children want a high school education, they must return to their family’s village. Otherwise, they become part of the local work force, an enforced supply of poorly educated cheap labor.
It’s pretty easy to see how America could improve their ranking on world tests like the PISA. Simply winnow out of high schools the children least likely to succeed. That called “cooking the books” in accounting parlance.
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Yes SSIIIRRR! I concur.
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Yes, I have students from China each year in my classes. Often, they stay in the U.S. for approximately one year and then return to China. Their parents tell me that the American school experience on their school transcript gives them an edge when applying to a choice school in China.
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I agree with Alan above. As a music teacher educator, I have graduate students from China. They excel at gathering information in their non-native language, which I admire and respect. But they struggle with analyzing, critiquing, and contributing their own “voice” to an argument, whether in discussion or in a document. My colleagues and I believe this is not due to language, but to their native educational culture.
On another note, Yong Zhao does an excellent job exposing differences between the Chinese and American education systems in his book, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Now at the University of Oregon, he has personal experience with both–he was educated in China, and his children, here.
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