• Current Scholars
• Alumni
• Dream Big
• Scholar Travels
• Scholar Art & Music
• Scholar Stories
• The Scholar Experience

Timothy P. Hurley

Biography

Several years after Tim Hurley graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, he took on a job teaching 4th grade as a Teach for America corps member in one of the Mississippi Delta's most impoverished areas. He found that the majority of his students read far below grade level, and a few had trouble forming all the letters of the alphabet. The difficulties his students faced in the classroom were compounded by the economic difficulties of the region as a whole.

Recognizing the substantial challenges that his students faced, Tim worked to create a better educational environment for them. He collected more than 200 new books from publishers and other schools. Going classroom to classroom, he helped teachers coordinate teaching content and share strategies that worked. Teachers and students alike put in hard work, and test scores showed big improvements. Tim also helped change the 4th-grade teaching structure into a team-teaching format so that teachers saw about 50 rather than 140 students a day. The principal later expanded this practice to all grades.

Teach for America invited Tim to teach incoming recruits what he had learned, and then made him its East Coast recruitment director. As a recruitment director, Tim increased the number of accepted applicants from his schools by 64%. Tim views education as the crucial instrument to give students "control of their future." He believes that, for students to have the educational opportunities they deserve, change must occur both inside and outside the classroom. This conviction propels Tim to Stanford this fall to start advanced degrees in both education and law.

Other Scholars Like Timothy