Quick Insight: David McCune on Serving the Inherent Nobility of Teaching

In 1990, David McCune and Gracia Alkema launched Corwin Press with the goal of putting educational research and theory into practice for harried primary and secondary school teachers and administrators. The imprint’s first book was Bringing Out the Best in Teachers by Joseph Blase and Peggy C. Kirby. In this Quick Insight, McCune – who was president of Sage from 1989 to 1999 – describes his own belief in the paramount value of classroom teaching and how that influenced the formation of Corwin.

The transcript of his Quick Insight appears below the video.

Hi, I’m David McCune and a long time ago, while I was CEO of Sage Publications. I was also the co-founder of Corwin Press. Corwin is a company that tries to help K-12 educators do their jobs better.

The reason it exists is I grew up in a family of educators and my mother was a was an elementary school teacher, and then eventually principal, and I grew up listening at the dinner table to all of the trials and tribulations of that job. I grew later to understand, or believe, that teaching is, I’ll say, the second most noble thing a human being can do for another. The first is to love them. But the second most noble thing is to teach a person something. And I think we should try every day to find a way to teach somebody something.

But I was bothered watching my mother through her career by the fact that K-12 educators are often used as political footballs. They’re often blamed for things: if the economy isn’t doing well, they say, “Oh, it’s because the K-12 system is terrible and the teachers are terrible” or whatever. But never when the economy is doing great or everything’s wonderful in a society, does anyone say, “Oh, it’s because the K-12 system is so good. It’s because those teachers do such a wonderful job!”

Well, they do. And they are passionate about what they do. They’re enthusiastic and the love of children and seeing children learn is unequal among K-12 educators.

So I wanted to try to find a way that we could a way that we could take the academic research-based knowledge we had at Sage and adapt that so it could be very useful to practicing teachers and practicing school principals. And that they could feel that they could do their job better and improve the lives of both their colleagues and the children who with whom they were entrusted.

And so the original idea of Corwin was, let’s do very practical things, practical guides, practical training materials that would help school principals, and also school teachers, do their jobs better. We tried to use research-based, evidence-based ideas to say, “Here are some tool tools in the in your toolbox that would help you do what you so desperately want to do, which is be good teachers of the children in your schools.”

So that’s where we all started and, and our first books were very simple ones. You know, I don’t know, a toolkit for brand new teachers that principals could give to their new teachers was an example.

But we expanded and expanded and expanded and, but the goal all along every step of the way was how do we find a way to help teachers to help these K-12 educators do their jobs better so that they could fulfill their own passions. I’ve never met a K-12 educator who did not deeply love and was deeply committed to the idea of helping their kids.

And while we didn’t publish curriculum materials for kids, we published and then develop training programs for the teachers. And, you know, in a different world, I wish I could have been a teacher. I don’t have the talent to be a K-12 teacher. It takes an enormous amount of talent to do that job well.

But I could, I think, by starting this little business many years ago, help them — those talented, committed teachers — do their jobs better. And of all the things I’ve ever done in my business career, by far the piece I’m proudest of is Corwin. And, and I was back then, and I still am today, even though I’m not, you know, I’m not involved in it day-to-day, but I am deeply proud of what all the people at Corwin do.

And every time I think of Corwin, in my mind’s eye, I see an enthusiastic, and tired, teacher or principal and imagine how we can help them.