Describes a re-examination of International Association of Educational Achievement data on the relative importance of school and home influences upon science achievement in high and low-income countries. New methods of analysis revealed that the effects of school and teacher quality on science achievement in developing nations were greater than…

Contrary to most previous research findings concerning influences on pupil achievement, data from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East show that the predominant influence on student learning is the quality of the schools and the teachers to which children are exposed. (RM)

Quality of schools is a critical resource in the production of school achievement, individual and national. Countries with a scarcity of resources (transportation, administration, and management) would be expected to perform worse in distributing any resource, especially one of such complexity as school quality, but this does not seem to occur.…