Materials For Adults Only

Andy Martin chronicles the rise and fall of Adult Education publishing.

For most of my ESL career, I have been involved in adult education. After I got back from the Peace Corps, gave up on grad school, the revolution, rock and roll stardom, and got married, I needed a “real” job paying “real” money. So I cashed in on my teaching experience, and found myself teaching “real” adult inmates at the Riker’s Island Correctional Facility in New York City. There was no ESL program as such, though about a fourth of my students spoke little or no English. What we had were GED classes, preparing students for their High School Equivalency diplomas. Since many students were reading at fourth grade or below, we also had some basic literacy materials. After Riker’s I taught in numerous Adult Ed and refugee programs, many of which still exist today.

The materials we used were published by Cambridge (not the University) and Contemporary. At the time (in the early 70’s) both
companies were independent. For those students who could handle it, I mostly used the big Cambridge and Contemporary GED prep books. The GED prep books were enormously successful during those years and continue to be very popular to this day. Cambridge sold upwards of 50,000 units annually, at one time. Most people teaching in Adult Ed have come across these materials at one time or another. They are really a staple all over the country. Furthermore, many ESL students end up using them too, since getting an equivalency degree is a popular option
across the country.

What do the initials G.E.D. stand for? No, it’s not “General Equivalency Diploma”. It’s actually “General Education Dev-elopment”. Next question. What is And-rogogy? No, it’s not teaching robots. It’s ways of teaching adults, as opposed to Pedagogy, which is teaching children. The concept comes from Malcolm Knowles, who coined the term in the 60’s to distinguish adult learning styles from those of children.
Adult Education as a profession is mostly alive and well. You can get a PhD in it, you can certainly teach it, join one of several professional organizations with conventions in it, get federal funding for it, run a ton of classes in it, and find tens of millions of students who need it. What you can’t do is find many books for it, because Adult Ed publishing is in a very sorry state and it’s getting sorrier. At one time, there were four major GED publishers in the area, Cambridge, Contemporary, Scott Foresman, and Steck Vaughn. There has also been a host of smaller houses that published supplemental materials for it, such as Janus, Fearon, Globe, South Western, Delmar, Glencoe, to name a
few.

The fate of many of these houses parallels that of many ESL publishers. Not a single one of the companies mentioned above now exists independently. Janus, Fearon and Globe, once a part of Prentice Hall, are a part of Pearson. South Western and Delmar belong to Thomson, and Glencoe is a part of McGraw Hill. Scott is Pearson’s. Steck is Harcourt’s. Contemporary, until recently joined at the hip to National Textbook and owned by The Tribune Corp., is now McGraw’s. And Cambridge? It’s gone.

The supplemental publishers have a chance to survive because it’s not that hard to understand the market. It’s basically literacy and low-level reading, content-based materials designed for adults. You go to the programs, you show the books, and they get bought--or not. Not so with GED publishing. It’s a little bit more complicated.
Here’s the deal:

• The GED testing service publishes the
  GED test.
  
• The test is revised once every ten years or
  so;
• The GED prep publishers need to be aware
  of the changes that will occur in the new
  tests so that their materials will be up to
  date.
  

That’s all there is to it.
Cambridge was a small New York educational niche publisher (similar to Regents who started out publishing materials to help students prepare for the New York State Regents examination.) Cambridge was acquired by the New York Times and was later sold to the Esquire Magazine group, and then sold again as part of that group to Simon & Schuster. S&S then bought Prentice Hall, (which bought Regents in ’87, creating Prentice Hall Regents.)

In those days, Cambridge was easily the most successful adult Ed publisher. But that wasn’t to last. After a major restructuring at Prentice Hall, sales started to dip, not just for Cambridge but for ESL too. Cambridge was shunted off to another division within Prentice Hall, which was an amalgam of Globe Fear on and Janus. Independent reps were hired to sell it. Then disaster struck. The GED testing service decided it was time to revise the test. The test was changed, the books weren’t and the list collapsed. Pearson (who had bought PHR) decided to sell off the remaining stock but not the company name: One down, three to go.

Actually it was already two down. While all this was going on, Glencoe, which became part of McGraw Hill after the Macmillan merger, had acquired the Scott Foresman GED list a few years earlier. Same story, no one knew what to do with it. After attempting to sell it via their post-secondary, vocational sales group, they also were out to lunch when the GED Testing service announced their intention to revise the test.
In the meantime, Southwestern, in the early 90’s, decided that GED prep publishing was a good market to enter. They assembled a small editorial staff and a marketing manager and came out with some nice materials, even incorporating GED prep software. Trouble is, they couldn’t get any of their reps to sell it, and the list died after two years.

Meanwhile, Steck-Vaughn and Contemp-orary were duking it out for the spoils. But, remember it is really out of their hands. Just this year, both parents decided it was time to bail. Contemporary went first, ending up at McGraw when the Trib sold its educational publishing unit. If Glencoe’s track record is any indication, I wouldn’t be buying Contemporary stock right now if it were traded separately–it’s not. Of course, if they happen to be reading this column and they decide to take my advice of seven paragraphs ago… Otherwise, it’s three down
and one to go.

And Steck? Well, it’s part of Harcourt, which has been on the block for the last four months, with some very interesting bidders. At last count there were four: Disney (strictly Mickey Mouse), Bertelsmann, Thomson and McGraw. If Thomson gets it (and I hear they are pretty confident over there), it could go to Southwestern, Delmar, or Heinle. The latter makes sense since the ESL reps will call on adult Ed programs anyway) - more rocket science.