Abstract

The 21st century has been marked by a shift from a production economy to a knowledge-based economy, and a development of insight into the intangible capabilities and skills of the workforce that can contribute to the accumulation of a human capital (Grant 1996, Mahoney and Kor 2015). The right path to enriching human capital begins with a good education. This paper examines the impact of social origin on the academic performance of 15-year-old students in Morocco in mathematics, reading and sciences, using data from the PISA 2018 international survey.
The nested structure of the data as well as the decomposition of the variance justifies the use of a multilevel analysis. This will involve analyzing the determinants of school performance linked to social origins and presenting a clear sheet on the situation of Moroccan schools, through various variables, some external to the school system, others internal. This method was generally initiated and developed in the field of educational sciences (Goldstein, 1995). It is a way to understand the types of data we have and to analyze the interrelationships because the estimated parameters incorporate the hierarchical effect of the data. Education is pertinently one of the phenomena where the hierarchy of data is particularly visible. We found also that, the model suffers from a level 2 endogeneity problem that will be solved using Hausman and Taylor method to increase the efficiency of the results.
The purpose of this work was to determine and analyze the factors relating to social origin that allow students to understand and assimilate the concepts taught to them in mathematics, science and reading.Thus, the estimation of a model with random constant and a model with constant and random slope allowed bringing out important results. Like overall performance, it turns out that student performance in mathematics depends, largely, on the social origin and individual and family characteristics of students, however, the variables linked to the school context have a statistically insignificant effect on the mathematics score. The same results are found for the other subjects, science and reading. Ultimately, these results can enlighten both public authorities, parents of students and teachers as to the measures to be taken in order to improve the quality and efficiency of the Moroccan education system.