Accumulating advantages over time: Family experiences and social class inequality in academic achievement Daniel Potter a,⇑ , Josipa Roksa b a American Institutes for Research, Washington, DC, United States b University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States article info Article history: Received 5 May 2012 Revised 3 January 2013 Accepted 28 February 2013 Available online 13 March 2013 Keywords: Social inequality Family Academic achievement Cumulative abstract Children from different family backgrounds enter schooling with different levels of aca- demic skills, and those differences grow over time. What explains this growing inequality? While the social reproduction tradition has argued that family contexts are central to pro- ducing class gaps in academic achievement, recent quantitative studies have found that family experiences explain only a small portion of those inequalities. We propose that resolving this inconsistency requires developing a new measure of family experiences that captures the continuity of exposure over time and thus more closely reflects the logic of the social reproduction tradition. Results using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) show that, consistent with previous quantitative research, time-specific measures of family experiences have little explanatory power. However, cumulative family experiences account for most of the growing inequality in aca- demic achievement between children from different social class backgrounds over time. These findings support claims from the social reproduction tradition, and contribute more broadly to the understanding of how family experiences contribute to social inequality. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Children from different family backgrounds enter schooling with different levels of academic skills, and those differences grow over time (Bodovski and Farkas, 2008; Bodovski and Youn, 2012; Cheadle, 2008, 2009; Fryer and Levitt, 2004; Yeung and Pfeiffer, 2009). What explains this growing inequality in academic achievement between children from different family backgrounds? There are two primary contexts that could contribute to increasing inequality: schools and families. While schools may seem like an obvious culprit, their role in increasing inequality has been challenged since the Coleman Report (Coleman, 1966). As such, the family has become a central focus of inquiries about the growing inequality in academic achievement (Alexander et al., 2001; Condron, 2009; Downey et al., 2004). One sociological tradition that has been particularly prominent in explaining how class-specific family experiences contribute to inequalities in children’s academic achievement is the social reproduction perspective (e.g., Bernstein, 1971; Bourdieu, 1990; Kohn, 1963; Lareau, 2003). According to this perspective, the family is a central component of the stratifi- cation processes because it is within the family that children are socialized into their class positions. That is, parents interact with children, expose them to specific experiences, and create a family environment in which to raise children that varies according to social class background. As a consequence, children develop specific skills, attitudes, tastes and preferences, only some of which (the ones associated with the middle class) are rewarded by social institutions such as schools. These 0049-089X/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.02.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW, Washington, DC 20007-3835, United States. E-mail address: dpotter@air.org (D. Potter). Social Science Research 42 (2013) 1018–1032 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch