The notion of school effectiveness has emerged as a concept in which to benchmark and compare schools at the local, national, and international level. The current paper takes a regional approach and explores effective schools using TIMSS 2007 8th grade mathematics data. The following research questions are addressed: What indicator variables appear to identify effective schools in Arab countries and what relative relationship do school factors show after controlling for the home background? The first section of the paper separates each country into two groups—the lowest achieving third and the highest achieving third of schools. As a second step, an analysis is used to select variables that discriminate between the high and low achievement groups. Finally, section two of the analysis applies multi-level models in order to disentangle the association of the home background and the schooling factors identified. Our analysis of last cycles’ TIMSS assessment found that a variety of common factors, such as shortage of resources, parent interactions, but also teacher related factors discriminate when adjusting for home background in Arab countries. The paper adds to the body of research on effective schools and provides a strong quantitative analysis, which suggests certain factors related to schooling appear to have an affect on student outcomes.