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Timothy Burke began his journey into urban education through a New York City teaching fellowship. He taught second grade while pursuing a master’s degree in elementary education at City University of New York’s Lehman College. Quickly recognized for his excellence in teaching, he served as coordinator for the Project Care program in the South Bronx. In this role, he developed programs that offered struggling students academic support as well as the opportunity to learn a new sport—in this case, fencing. The next year, he was lead teacher for Uncommon School’s flagship elementary charter school in Bedford-Stuyvesant. There, Burke helped ensure that his low-income students outperformed their district peers on the New York State proficiency exams.
In 2007, Burke was selected as a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to teach and study at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. There, he helped teach and mentor both future and current teachers of English as a second language. Upon returning to the United States, Burke served as the founding director of curriculum and instruction at PAVE Academy Charter School in Red Hook, New York. He is now working on the West Coast as dean at the East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, a northern California charter high school, trying to reverse the local area’s staggering 72 percent high school dropout rate.