Pearson Education

Following the British government's acquisition and nationalization of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s,[8][9] the diversified multinational conglomerate entered the education market.[10] It acquired the textbook publisher Longman in 1968.[10]

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.[8][11] In 1988 Pearson plc purchased Addison-Wesley, the sixth-largest publisher of textbooks in the U.S.,[12] and merged it with Pearson's educational books subsidiary Longman to create Addison-Wesley Longman.[13][11] In 1996, it acquired HarperCollins Educational Publishing and merged it with Addison-Wesley Longman.[14]

Marjorie Scardino, who was CEO of Pearson plc from 1997 to 2013, increasingly focused the conglomerate on education and on making education acquisitions.[15][16] In 1998, Pearson plc purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster, which included Prentice Hall, Allyn & Bacon, and certain parts of the former Macmillan Inc..[17][18] Later in 1998 it merged Simon & Schuster's educational business with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education.[1]

After closed and divested most of former Macmillan Inc. divisions in 1999, Pearson Education sold the Macmillan trademark in the United States to Holtzbrinck Publishing Group which owned the British Macmillan Publishers in 2001.[19][20][21][22][23][24] Alpha Books, one of the former Macmillan Inc. imprint acquired by Pearson was later transferred from Pearson Education to then-sister company Penguin Group in 2003.

Pearson Education sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division then operated under Scott Foresman to RCL Benziger in 2007 (which also acquired Benziger from McGraw-Hill in the same year).[25]

Pearson Education was rebranded as simply Pearson in 2011,[3] and split into Pearson North America and Pearson International.[26] A restructuring announced in 2013 combined Pearson North America and Pearson International into one Pearson company[27] organised around three global lines of business: School, Higher Education, and Professional.[28][29]

Following the sale of its financial news publications Financial Times and The Economist in 2015, Pearson plc rebranded in January 2016 to focus solely on education, and the corporation adopted a new logo.[4] The logo is the unconventional symbol known as the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, meant to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality"[4] and "the excitement and fun of learning".[30]

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.[6] E-textbooks will be updated frequently, while printed books will be updated less often.[6] Students wanting printed books will need to rent them.[6] As of 2019, the firm received more than half of its annual revenues from digital sales,[6] and the U.S. accounted for 20 percent of Pearson's annual revenue coming from courseware.[6]

Pearson has a number of publishing imprints, including:

• BBC Active (joint venture)[31]
• InformIT[32]
  • Addison-Wesley Professional[32]
  • Adobe Press[32]
  • Cisco Press[32]
  • FT Press[32]
  • Peachpit Press[32]
  • Que Publishing[32]
  • Sams Publishing[32]
• Longman[33]
• Rigby (outside the United States, where the imprint is owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)[34]
• York Notes (partnership)[35]

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.[36]

It publishes books, e-books, and videos, and its imprints include Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing.[32]

InformIT.com is one of the websites of the Pearson Technology Group,[37] and one of several sites in the InformIT Network.[38] The site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from its imprints.[38]

Other sites in the InformIT Network include Peachpit.com.[37] 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.[38] Peachpit is a publishing partner for Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, and others.[38]

In 2001, the Pearson Technology Group and O'Reilly Media LLC formed a joint partnership called Safari Books Online, to offer a web-based electronic library of technical and business books from InformIT's imprint partners and O'Reilly Media.[39] The InformIT Network offers access to this service via its web sites.[40] Pearson sold its interest in Safari Books Online to O'Reilly in 2014.[41]

Pearson's products include MyMathLab and Mastering Platform.[42]

In 2006, Pearson School Systems, a division of Pearson Education, acquired PowerSchool, a student information system, from Apple; terms of the deal were not disclosed.[43] PowerSchool was a profitable product for Pearson; in 2014, it generated $97 million in revenue and $20 million in operating income.[44] In 2015, Pearson sold PowerSchool to Vista Equity Partners for $350 million cash.[44]

In 2007, the company developed the youth-oriented online 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.[45]

Pearson owns Cogmed, a brain fitness and working memory training program founded in 1999 by Swedish researcher Torkel Klingberg.[46][47]

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.[48]

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.[49] In 2011, Pearson obtained a 5-year, $32 million contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 3–8.[50]

Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson based out of Seattle, partnered with AARP in 2014 to develop and add to a series of technology books for seniors.[51] The series, which includes My iPad For Seniors, and My Social Media for Seniors, are large-print and colourful.[51]

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.[52] Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, a 4th grade math question with two correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign-language math tests.[53]

• Educational publishing companies
• List of largest UK book publishers
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• McGraw-Hill Education

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