I compare the education systems of China and India and examine what India can learn from the negative and positive experiences of China’s policy experiments with education during the Mao and the Post-Mao periods. The main topics to be addressed. 1) The broader educational strategies followed for primary, secondary, and vocational and higher education. 2) The education delivery systems—the kind of centralization-decentralization-privatization of education financing and curricular reform policies was followed, and how these policies affected the educational quality and disparities. 3) Parent’s motivation to enroll their children in school and children’s motivation to learn – I will discuss in this context my work with Heckman, and other research that I have done in this area. Analyses of PISA data found that teacher quality is the most central to student learning. Furthermore, the school quality, school choice, school infrastructure, teacher recruiting, teacher training, and teacher accountability are also very important for providing quality education. I will first point out what we learn statistically from the public domain dataset–India Human Development Survey of 2005–about the importance of these factors. I then draw from the techniques that Shanghai-China and a few other east Asian countries adopted to attain high performance in PISA (measured in average score with low disparity across social groups) to point out what positive lessons India can learn to achieve higher educational qualities with equalities. I will also talk about the effectiveness of the IT-technology, distant learning and quotas for SC/ST in closing the educational gap across caste, rural-urban location and income groups in India.
