HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Pearson Education, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc. The subsidiary was formed in 1998, when Pearson plc acquired
Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...
's educational business and combined it with Pearson's existing education company
Addison-Wesley Addison–Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson plc, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison–Wesley also distributes its technical titles ...
Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publisher, publishing company founded in 1724 in London, England, which is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman ...
. Pearson Education was restyled as simply Pearson in 2011. In 2016, the diversified parent corporation Pearson plc rebranded to focus entirely on education publishing and services; further, as of 2023, Pearson Education is Pearson plc's main subsidiary. In 2019, Pearson Education began phasing out the prominence of its hard-copy textbooks in favor of digital textbooks, which cost the company far less, and can be updated frequently and easily. As of 2023, Pearson Education has testing/teaching centers in over 55 countries worldwide; the UK and the U.S. have the most centers. The headquarters of parent company Pearson plc are in London, England. Pearson Education's U.S. headquarters were in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey until the headquarters were closed at the end of 2014. Most of Pearson Education's printing is done by third-party suppliers.


Company history

Following the British government's acquisition and nationalization of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s, the diversified multinational conglomerate entered the education market. It acquired the textbook publisher
Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publisher, publishing company founded in 1724 in London, England, which is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman ...
in 1968. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pearson plc divested further from a number of its industries and acquired more educational publishing companies, and its education publishing operations became steadily larger and more significant. In 1988, Pearson plc purchased
Addison-Wesley Addison–Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson plc, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison–Wesley also distributes its technical titles ...
, the sixth-largest publisher of textbooks in the U.S., and merged it with Pearson's educational books subsidiary Longman to create Addison-Wesley Longman. In 1996, it acquired HarperCollins Educational Publishing and merged it with Addison-Wesley Longman. Marjorie Scardino, who was CEO of Pearson plc from 1997 to 2013, increasingly focused the conglomerate on education and on making education acquisitions. In 1998, Pearson plc purchased the education division of
Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...
, which included
Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...
,
Allyn & Bacon Allyn & Bacon, founded in 1868, is a higher education textbook publisher in the areas of education, humanities and social sciences. It is an imprint of Pearson Education, the world's largest education publishing and technology company, which is ...
, and parts of Macmillan Inc. including the Macmillan name. Later in 1998, it merged Simon & Schuster's educational business with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education. Pearson Education sold and divested most of its Simon & Schuster divisions in 1999. It sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division it operated under the
Scott Foresman Scott Foresman was an elementary educational publisher for PreK through Grade 6 in all subject areas. Its titles are now owned by Savvas Learning Company which formed from former Pearson Education K12 division. The old Glenview headquarters ...
imprint, to RCL Benziger in 2007. In 2007, Pearson Education sold the Macmillan name to Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which had purchased Macmillan Publishing Ltd. in the late 1990s. In 2000, Pearson acquired Virtual University Enterprises, an electronic testing company founded in 1994, and renamed it Pearson VUE. According to the company, as of 2023, it delivers numerous skills tests and certification tests electronically in over 180 countries. Pearson Education was rebranded as simply Pearson in 2011, and split into Pearson North America and Pearson International. A restructuring announced in 2013 combined Pearson North America and Pearson International into one Pearson company organised around three global lines of business: School, Higher Education, and Professional. Following the sale of its financial news publications ''
Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...
'' and ''
The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...
'' in 2015, Pearson plc rebranded in January 2016 to focus solely on education, and the corporation adopted a new logo. The logo is the unconventional symbol known as the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, and the logo is meant to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality" and "the excitement and fun of learning". In 2019, Pearson announced it would begin the process of phasing out the publishing of printed textbooks, in a plan to move into a more digital first strategy. E-textbooks will be updated frequently, while printed books will be updated less often. Students wanting printed books will need to rent them. As of 2019, the firm received more than half of its annual revenues from digital sales, and the US accounted for 20 percent of Pearson's annual revenue coming from courseware. In 2019, Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management, which rebranded it as Savvas Learning Company. In 2019, Pearson also sold its remaining 25% stake in
Penguin Random House Penguin Random House Limited is a British-American multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was or ...
to
Bertelsmann The Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, commonly known as Bertelsmann (), is a German privately held company, private multinational corporation, multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, ...
. In 2022, Pearson Education announced that they intended to sell their digital textbooks as NFTs, in order to profit from secondhand sales. In 2022, Pearson acquired ClutchPrep, a Miami-based edtech startup that offers sample questions, test prep and college exam prep video guides. The service has been renamed Channels.


Imprints

Pearson has a number of
publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
imprints Imprint or imprinting may refer to: Entertainment * ''Imprint'' (TV series), Canadian television series * "Imprint" (''Masters of Horror''), episode of TV show ''Masters of Horror'' * ''Imprint'' (film), a 2007 independent drama/thriller film ...
, including: * BBC Active (joint venture) * InformIT ** Addison-Wesley Professional ** Adobe Press ** Cisco Press **
FT Press Financial Times Press in the United States and Financial Times Publishing in the United Kingdom are the book publishing imprints related to the ''Financial Times'' newspaper. The book imprints are owned by Pearson plc, a global publishing compan ...
** Peachpit Press ** Que Publishing ** Sams Publishing *
Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publisher, publishing company founded in 1724 in London, England, which is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman ...
* Rigby (outside the United States, where the imprint is owned by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company ( ; HMH) is an American publisher of textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, and reference works. The company is based in the Financial District, Boston, Boston Financial District. It was fo ...
) *
York Notes York Notes are a series of English literature study guides sold in the United Kingdom and in approximately 100 countries worldwide. They are sold as revision material for GCSE and A-level exams particularly as literary guides to introduce stu ...
(partnership)


InformIT

InformIT, a subsidiary of Pearson Education, is an online book vendor and an electronic publisher of technology and education content. It is headquartered in
Indianapolis, Indiana Indianapolis ( ), colloquially known as Indy, is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Indiana, most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana, Marion ...
. It publishes books,
e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Al ...
s, and videos, and its imprints include Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing. InformIT.com is one of the websites of the Pearson Technology Group, and one of several sites in the InformIT Network. The site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from its imprints. Other sites in the InformIT Network include Peachpit.com. Peachpit is a publisher that has been producing books on graphic design, desktop publishing, multimedia, web design and development, digital video, and general computing since 1986. Peachpit is a publishing partner for Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, and others. In 2001, the Pearson Technology Group and O'Reilly Media LLC formed a joint partnership called
Safari Books Online A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
, to offer a web-based electronic library of technical and business books from InformIT's imprint partners and
O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...
. The InformIT Network offers access to this service via its web sites. Pearson sold its interest in Safari Books Online to O'Reilly in 2014.


Technology products

Pearson's products include MyMathLab and Mastering Platform. In 2006, Pearson School Systems, a division of Pearson Education, acquired PowerSchool, a student information system, from
Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
; terms of the deal were not disclosed. PowerSchool was a profitable product for Pearson; in 2014, it generated $97 million in revenue and $20 million in operating income. In 2015, Pearson sold PowerSchool to Vista Equity Partners for $350 million cash. In 2007, the company developed the youth-oriented
online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on lin ...
quest game '' Poptropica'', through its Family Education Network. In 2015, Pearson's Family Education Network, along with Poptropica, were sold to the London-based investment group Sandbox Partners. In 2010, Pearson purchased Cogmed, a brain fitness and working memory training program founded in 1999 by Swedish researcher Torkel Klingberg. In 2019, Cogmed was transferred back to the original founders. In 2016, Pearson acquired StatCrunch, a statistical analysis tool created by Webster West in 1997. Pearson had already been the primary distributor of StatCrunch for several years.


Partnerships

In 2007, Pearson partnered with four other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform. In 2011, Pearson obtained a five-year, $32 million contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 3–8. Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson based out of Seattle, partnered with
AARP AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is an interest group in the United States focusing on issues affecting those 50 and older. The organization, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., said it had more than 38  ...
in 2014 to develop and add to a series of technology books for seniors. The series, which includes ''My iPad For Seniors,'' and ''My Social Media for Seniors,'' are large-print and colourful.


Criticism


Errors in tests

In the spring of 2012, tests that Pearson designed for the NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors, which caused controversy. One of the most prominent featured a passage about a talking pineapple on the 8th Grade ELA test (revealed to be based on Daniel Pinkwater's ''The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant'', with the eggplant changed into a pineapple). After public outcry, the NYSED announced it would not count the questions in scoring. Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding
astronomical unit The astronomical unit (symbol: au or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to . Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its m ...
s, a 4th grade math question with two possible correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign-language math tests.


See also

* *
List of largest UK book publishers This is a list of largest UK trade book publishers, with some of their principal imprint (trade name), imprints, ranked by sales value. List According to Nielsen BookScan as of 2010 the largest book publishers of the United Kingdom were: # P ...
*
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company ( ; HMH) is an American publisher of textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, and reference works. The company is based in the Financial District, Boston, Boston Financial District. It was fo ...
*
McGraw-Hill Education McGraw Hill is an American education science company that provides educational content, software, and services for students and educators across various levels—from K-12 to higher education and professional settings. They produce textbooks, ...


References


External links

Official website
{{authority control * Educational publishing companies Educational publishing companies of the United Kingdom Publishing companies of the United Kingdom Book publishing companies based in London Computer book publishing companies Educational book publishing companies Textbook publishing companies Education companies established in 1998 British companies established in 1998 Publishing companies established in 1998 1998 establishments in England