Thurston Domina

About

Thurston Domina is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of Graduate Studies at the UNC School of Education, holding the title of Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, in 2006, and his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1997. With over 20 years of experience, Domina has dedicated his career to documenting educational inequalities and exploring policies and strategies aimed at fostering a more just, equitable, and inclusive society. His research as a sociologist focuses on understanding the relationship between education and social inequality in the United States. He investigates how schools sort students into different learning environments, how this sorting influences students' life chances, and how educational policies and practices can expand opportunities for all students. Additionally, he studies the interaction between families and schools to understand how out-of-school factors affect the distribution of educational opportunities. His work encompasses a broad range of educational levels, from early childhood to undergraduate education, utilizing various analytic tools to examine how families influence children's educational opportunities, how schools accommodate diverse learner needs, and the consequences of educational experiences for child development and transition to adulthood. His research has been…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Political Science
• Developmental psychology
• Demographic economics
• Medicine
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• Remote or Removed: Predicting Successful Engagement with Online Learning during COVID-19

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2021 · 134 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Using data from a spring 2020 survey of nearly 10,000 parents of elementary school parents in one large southeastern public school district, the authors investigate predictors of elementary school student engagement during the initial period of pandemic remote learning. The authors hypothesize that household material and technological resources, school programming and instructional strategies, and family social capital contribute to student engagement in remote learning. The analyses indicate th…

  DOI

• It matters how you start: Early numeracy mastery predicts high school math <scp>course‐taking</scp> and college attendance

  Infant and Child Development · 2021 · 88 citations

  ) administered to 1,364 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (SECCYD), this study measures children's mastery of three numeric competencies (counting, concrete representational arithmetic and abstract arithmetic operations) at 54 months of age. We find that, even after controlling for key demographic characteristics, the numeric competency that children master prior to school entry relates to important e…

  DOI

• “We’re in This Together”: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital in Elementary School PTOs

  American Educational Research Journal · 2020 · 76 citations

  Scholarship on the links between families and schools encompasses contradictory notions about social capital and its relation to inequality. One view holds that schools can narrow inequality by generating dense relationships among families, while others suggest that advantaged parents can use these networks to hoard opportunities. This multiple case study analyzes qualitative data from diverse North Carolina elementary schools to learn how parents build and deploy social capital. We distinguish…

  DOI

• There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: School Meals, Stigma, and Student Discipline

  American Educational Research Journal · 2024-01-09 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows high-poverty schools to offer free meals to all students regardless of household income. Conceptualizing universal meal provision as a strategy to alleviate stigma associated with school meals, we hypothesize that CEP implementation reduces the incidence of suspensions, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds and minoritized students. We link educational records for students enrolled in Oregon public schools between 2010 and 2017 wit…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Impact of School Counselor Resources in Elementary and Middle Grades

  Professional School Counseling · 2022-03-01 · 10 citations

  article1st author

  Prior research indicates that the availability of school counselors—as measured by school counselor-to-student ratios—predicts desired student outcomes in high schools. Less is known about the impact of school counselors in elementary and middle schools, where school counselors take on a broad array of responsibilities related to youth development. Using 6 years of student and school staffing data from North Carolina, we estimated school fixed effect models to assess the associations between sch…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Parent-Teacher Organizations Distribution of Learning Opportunities

  NSF · $175k · 2016–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Emily K. Penner

  University of California, Irvine

  25 shared

• Andrew M. Penner

  University of California, Irvine

  24 shared

• Andrew McEachin

  Educational Testing Service

  21 shared

• Paul Hanselman

  University of California, Irvine

  14 shared

• NaYoung Hwang

  University of New Hampshire

  13 shared

• Marianne Bitler

  13 shared

• AnneMarie Conley

  13 shared

• Paul Attewell

  City University of New York

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educatio…

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Dorothy L. Espelageh-89
• R. Keith Sawyerh-58
• Troy D. Sadlerh-57