Pearson Education, (branded as Pearson since 2011) is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc. Formed in 1998, when Pearson plc acquired Simon & Schuster's educational business and combined it with Pearson's existing education company Addison-WesleyLongman.[1] Pearson Education was rebranded as Pearson in 2011.[3] In 2016, the diversified parent corporation Pearson plc rebranded to focus entirely on education publishing and services; as of 2023, Pearson Education is Pearson plc's main subsidiary.[4][5]
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.[6]
As of 2023, Pearson Education has testing/teaching centers in over 55 countries worldwide; the UK and the U.S. have the most centers.[4] The headquarters of parent company Pearson plc are in London, England.[4] Pearson Education's U.S. headquarters were in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey until the headquarters were closed at the end of 2014.[7] Most of Pearson Education's printing is done by third-party suppliers.[4]
History
Early history
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 company on education, emphasizing acquisitions in the sector.[15][16] In 1998, Pearson plc purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster, which included Prentice Hall, Allyn & Bacon,[17][18] and parts of Macmillan Inc. including the Macmillan name.[19][20] Later in 1998, Pearson merged with Simon & Schuster's educational business with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education.[1]
Pearson Education sold and divested most of its Simon & Schuster divisions in 1999.[21] It sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division it operated under the Scott Foresman imprint, to RCL Benziger in 2007.[22] In 2007, Pearson Education sold the Macmillan name to Holtzbrinck Publishing Group,[19][20] which had purchased Macmillan Publishing Ltd. in the late 1990s.[23]
In 2000, Pearson acquired Virtual University Enterprises, an electronic testing company founded in 1994, and renamed it Pearson VUE.[24] According to the company, as of 2023, it delivers numerous skills tests and certification tests electronically in over 180 countries.[25][26]
Pearson formation and rebranding
Pearson Education was rebranded as simply Pearson in 2011,[3] and split into Pearson North America and Pearson International.[27] A restructuring announced in 2013 combined Pearson North America and Pearson International into one Pearson company[28] organised around three global lines of business: School, Higher Education, and Professional.[29][30]
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.[5] The logo features the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality"[5] and "the excitement and fun of learning".[31]
In late 2025, Pearson VUE announced it would rebrand as simply Pearson, with its assessment segment identified as Pearson Professional Assessments. [32]
Digital transformation
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 US accounted for 20 percent of Pearson's annual revenue coming from courseware.[6]
In 2019, Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management,[33][34] which rebranded it as Savvas Learning Company.[35][36] In 2019, Pearson also sold its remaining 25% stake in Penguin Random House to Bertelsmann.[37]
In 2022, Pearson Education announced that they intended to sell their digital textbooks as NFTs, in order to profit from secondhand sales.[38]
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.[39][40]
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.[46]
InformIT.com is one of the websites of the Pearson Technology Group,[47] and one of several sites in the InformIT Network.[48] The site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from its imprints.[48]
Other sites in the InformIT Network include Peachpit.com.[47]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.[48] Peachpit is a publishing partner for Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, and others.[48]
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.[49] The InformIT Network offers access to this service via its web sites.[50] Pearson sold its interest in Safari Books Online to O'Reilly in 2014.[51]
In 2006, Pearson School Systems, a division of Pearson Education, acquired PowerSchool, a student information system, and parent portal, from Apple; terms of the deal were not disclosed.[53] PowerSchool was a profitable product for Pearson; in 2014, it generated $97 million in revenue and $20 million in operating income.[54] In 2015, Pearson sold PowerSchool to Vista Equity Partners for $350 million cash.[54]
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.[55]
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.[61]
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.[62] In 2011, Pearson obtained a five-year, $32million contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 3–8.[63]
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.[64] The series, which includes My iPad For Seniors, and My Social Media for Seniors, are large-print and colourful.[64]
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.[65] Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, 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.[66]
12Long, Steven; Jacques, Derek; Kepos, Paula, eds. (2019). "Pearson plc". International Directory of Company Histories, Volume 207. St. James Press / GaleCengage. OCLC1066283259.
↑"InformIT Promotions". informit.com. Retrieved 14 September 2023. 2023 Pearson Education, InformIT. All rights reserved. 800 East 96th Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46240
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