Harcourt Assessment
| Parent company | Harcourt |
|---|---|
| Status | Defunct |
| Predecessor | The Psychological Corporation, World Book Company |
| Founded | 1921 |
| Founder | James McKeen Cattell |
| Successor | Pearson Education |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Publication types | testing materials |
Harcourt Assessment was a company that published and distributed educational and psychological assessment tools and therapy resources and provided educational assessment and data management services for national, state, district and local assessments. On January 30, 2008, Harcourt Assessment was merged into Pearson's Assessment & Information group after being acquired from Reed Elsevier for $950 million.
Harcourt Assessment's history dates to the early part of the 20th century. Although the company name derives from Harcourt Brace & Company, which was established in 1919, the corporate heritage goes back to 1905 and the founding of World Book Company. Many of the educational products produced by Harcourt Assessment originated at World Book. The psychological assessments originated at The Psychological Corporation, which was founded in 1921.
Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace were friends at Columbia University in New York, and both worked for Henry Holt & Company before founding their own publishing company in 1919. Harcourt Brace & Company published the works of a number of world-renowned writers, including Sinclair Lewis, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Thurber, George Orwell and Robert Penn Warren.
By 1960, Harcourt Brace led the market in high school textbook publishing, but had little presence in the elementary school market. That year, William Jovanovich, who had become president of the company in 1954, took the company public and merged Harcourt Brace & Company with World Book Company to create Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. This was a strategic move that had a long-term impact on the company because World Book was an established elementary textbook publisher and a test publisher.
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