The impact of primary school quality on learning in Egypt

Abstract

In many industrialized societies it is suggested that school quality has less than the anticipated impact on student achievement once the influence of the family has been considered. Since schools are more easily amenable to government intervention, the ambiguous showing of schools has not augered well for a public philosophy which portrays schools as agents of social change. This report re-examines the relationships among home, school and achievement performance in the Egyptian context by assaying the relative impact of families and schools on student test performance. This re-examination is undertaken, in part, because in LDCs one of the strongest associations with level of per capita income is the proportion of school age population enrolled in primary classes. This link between primary school attendence and national development places importance on the need to improve the quality of numeracy/literacy skills in order to further increase the efficiency of the Egyptian economy. Similar to findings in other third world primary school systems, the impact of school quality on achievement performance explains more variance than does the influence of the home. Apparently, Egyptian primary schools do provide a learning milieu independent of home resources which affects pupil test performance on basic literacy skills. Given the impact of separate home and school inputs to achievement performance mentioned above, the last question raised in the paper asks whether school quality in Egypt affects the learning of socially disadvantaged children more than others. This can be checked by examining the interactive term between home and school when a regression is performed on student achievement. Findings reveal that indeed the incremental effects of school quality on the poor are greater than those found for children of advantaged backgrounds. Apparently, Egypt's longstanding egalitarian ideology espousing educational opportunity has paid some dividents to those children of the poor who have remained in school.