Parents' education and literacy skills: Evidence on inequality of socioeconomic status in Arab countries

The international comparative assessments of students' achievement have revealed that students in MENA countries have meager literacy skills compared to their peers in other countries. The success of these countries in expanding access to schooling has not been followed by a similar access in equipping students with cognitive skills which are deemed to be important in this knowledge economy. In addition to the low achievement, the persistent inequalities in this region may contribute in the longer run to widen the gap between students from higher socioeconomic groups and those from low socioeconomic groups. A recent study conducted by Isfahani, Belhaj Hassine, and Assaad (2014) shows that a large share of inequality in achievement in MENA countries is due to family background and community characteristics. This study aims to contribute to the growing and rare research papers on inequalities in MENA region. It addresses the disparities in test scores of students in four MENA countries that took part in PISA 2012 assessment, by examining the impact of socioeconomic factors on these scores. Following Martins and Veiga (2010), the study uses two different methodologies. The first one assesses the impact of each component of SES students' achievement including the school SES composition using hierarchical linear models (HLM). The second one is inherited from medical studies and makes use of the decomposition of the concentration index. The results suggest that parents' education and school socioeconomic status are positively linked to academic achievement and both of them contribute to the socioeconomic-related inequality in achievement in all countries under study. They are the main, if not the sole drivers of inequality.