I had worked at Prentice Hall as
a freelancer (through a temp agency) from July 1997 to January 1998, and
again for short periods later in 1998. The period ending January 1998 was on a
massive project involving high school literature textbooks. Then I worked for them in 2001 and 2002 as a
freelancer, employed directly (not through a temp agency), doing seasonal work
on supplements for the Humanities and Social Sciences department of their
Higher Education division. (Believe it or not, I still have my corporate ID
card for them, the big-company kind with a cord on it so you can wear it around
your neck.)
As some may know, Prentice Hall,
among other educational companies, was bought up by Pearson, a British firm, in
1998. The whole conglomerate in the U.S. has been known as Pearson Education,
since. The parent company, of course, is in Britain.
Pearson Education has been in
the news recently as being the vendor that made the highly controversial PARCC
test. In an unrelated matter, Pearson also moved its headquarters this year from
Upper Saddle River, N.J., to Hoboken, N.J. (and this move had been in the works
for some years).
What could be ahead, blog-wise
I have a host of memories of my
experience of that firm from 1997 to 2002, and I could variously tell a limited story or a fuller story (subject to how much I want this to consume my time
and energy).
A way I thought my old
reminiscences might be relevant to people today who are up in arms over the
PARCC would be, actually, limited.
First, I don’t think that members of the public’s protesting to Pearson Education
(as has happened, in Hoboken), as if the company was the philosophical or
legislative source of the PARCC, is especially useful or quite right. But that’s
a minor issue, and whether that seems smart is up to the parents who are
offended by the PARCC, anyway. My own years-old story would, not especially
enlighteningly, support the question, is Pearson a behemoth of a corporation,
or does it act like one? Yes, but
would that help people understand the technicalities of the PARCC? Probably
not.
From my own angle, I was
inclined to write on my blog about Pearson/Prentice Hall starting last year or
maybe in 2013, but didn’t feel a driving need to, yet. Today, as I get more “into”
writing the blog entry, I am surprised at how much I need to joggle my memory.
But as with other old topics, I can work up some nice details and a full-enough
account. (And I can provide a pdf or two of something as a visual “exhibit.”)
When I recently found some
letters (from 1998) between me and a fellow freelance editor whom I’d worked
with in 1997-98, I thought this would provide a good grounding for a way to
look at the nature of some of the publishing world, and (not the same, of
course) of the New Jersey economy. Along with this, supplying maybe the most
fun, I would look at how someone (like the coworker just mentioned) who not
only was a professorly type but was from well out of the area—as from Alaska,
or Washington State—might reflect on these: the nature of publishing and of New
Jersey (naively or not).
A practical spur to thinking anew about Pearson
One thing that got me more
motivated to write on Pearson is that it amazes me how tough it is to try to
get freelance work there—indeed, since about 2005, when I’ve been more apt to
send letters to what few contacts I knew there (none resulted in work). [Update 5/29/15: The way I contacted them, I found after checking records, has been more sporadic than I'd thought. See the last paragraph in this entry in this series for more information.]
I think a large part of the
difficulty is something that actually, over the past 15 or so years, has
defined changes in the business world in other sectors of the economy,
particularly among huge companies (or those that want to seem that way)—that,
with computerization, the Internet, and the financial challenges to “big-money”
corporations, big companies that used to be able to employ freelancers in a
generous way of rounding up a herd of locals (via temp agencies) who were a reasonable
drive away have generally gotten to be more of an entity that maintains its
corporate power and self-protections by doing the most it can NOT to use local
freelancers, but to have workers work in “distance” fashion, sometimes in other
states (which can help regarding potential employment-related legal issues, as—for
one thing—it may place technical stumbling blocks in the way of a freelancer’s
suing the employing corporation, or—as relevant—reporting it to state
employment [labor-law compliance] agencies).
Another development is that big
corporations go as far as they can to handle lots of other stuff as if they are
an entity that is “more massive machine than hands-on men”—with work processes, money
business, public relations, and such all using online and other electronic
means, and “the little workers” kept as at much of remove from power (or within its clutches) within the bigger
machine as possible.
How I mean all this will become
clearer when I tell my old war story. But be assured that I have next to no
info to give on PARCC, as I only learn about that what I read in the news, which lately seems like a lot.
