Within industrialized countries, much is known about the relationship between schools’ material inputs or social practices and pupils’ achievement levels. Less is known about school effects in developing countries. In the Third World, the secular school is often a novel institution, operating in social settings where written literacy and formal socialization are relatively recent phenomena. Therefore, even schools with limited material resources appear to have a stronger impact on academic achievement, independent of pupils’ family background, than within industrialized countries. This optimistic claim is undercut, however, by limitations in how pupil background characteristics have been specified within empirical models. I review 60 (multivariate) studies conducted in the Third World that (a) report on the school’s aggregate influence on academic achievement versus the influence of family background and (b) assess the relative influence of alternative school inputs and organizational practices, pointing to more efficient strategies for raising pupil achievement. A framework is introduced to critically evaluate this existing empirical work and to suggest a second generation of questions that researchers might ask in the future.
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