Schooling quality in eastern Europe: Educational production during transition

This paper uses student-level Third International Mathematics andScience Study (TIMSS) data to analyze the determinants of schoolingquality for seven Eastern European transition countries by estimatingeducational production functions. The results show substantial effectsof student background on educational performance and a much lower impactof resources and the institutional setting. Two different groups ofcountries emerge. For the first group that features high mean testscores and has progressed far in transition, large effects of familybackground on student performance and a higher spread of test scoresillustrate the similarity to Western European schooling systems, theperformance of which it surpasses. Schools of the second group produceinstead a denser distribution of educational achievement, characteristicof communist societies.