Students’ Achievement in the MENA Countries: The Heyneman-Loxley Effect Revisited Using TIMSS 2007 Data

Since the controversial finding of the Coleman Report (1966), which was that school resources had little effect on educational outcomes comparing to family background, huge literature has emerged in order to verify the above finding in countries other than the United States. The Heyneman-Loxley work (1983) presented for the first time clear evidence that variation in school resource quality could matter more than variation in family inputs in low and middle-income countries. Following this literature, and using TIMSS 2007 data, we attempt in this study to revisit the Heyneman-Loxely hypothesis and the related debate regarding the overall importance of schools in explaining variations in student achievement across MENA countries. Survey regression techniques and quantile regressions have been used. Results showed that the Heyneman-Loxley effect was not fully supported across the countries. Besides, the Heyneman-Loxley effect is still valid in some middle-income countries at the lower point of the conditional distribution of mathematics and science scores. Yet, some Gulf countries feature a total contradiction with the mentioned effect at the lower tail of the distribution where school resources seem to matter more than Socioeconomic status (SES) in students’ performances.