[1] Burns is a 1958 graduate of the Wellington C. Mepham High School in The Bellmores, New York.
[1] In 1991, the Bank Street College of Education in New York awarded Burns an honorary doctoral degree.
[4] In 1995 the Mepham High School Alumni Association listed Burns in their Hall of Fame.
[6] In 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Math Solutions a $2.2 million grant "to fund the development of a Web-based diagnostic tool that will help middle school teachers assess students' computational and problem-solving skills".
[7] The end product of this grant was Math Reasoning Inventory, an assessment tool developed by Burns in collaboration with K–12 teachers, which is available without cost to teachers and administrators.