Education
In shortfall: UNESCO counts 250 million children and youth out of school worldwide, about 16 percent of the primary to upper-secondary age group.
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Schooling is overwhelmingly a public, government-financed function. The out-of-school population is concentrated where public systems are weakest, so states and donors sit on the critical path. Corporate levers exist at the edges. Testing and publishing firms such as Pearson, ETS, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin spent at least 20 million dollars lobbying to expand the testing market. Virtual charter operator Stride lobbied in 27 states in 2022 and faced SEIU lobbying-disclosure proposals in 2021 and 2023. Civil society pressure led the IFC to divest from the fee-charging school chain Bridge International Academies over equity and child-protection failures. Supply chains touch attendance too, as with Tulipshare's 2023 proposal pressing Mondelez on cocoa-sector child labor that robs children of schooling. The largest corporate contribution may be fiscal. The Tax Justice Network estimates that tax reforms on the international agenda, recovering revenue lost to tax abuse and taxing extreme wealth, could put 72 million children in school. No listed company or lobbying campaign stands as a necessary obstacle between the 250 million out-of-school children and a classroom. Owners voting on lobbying transparency, supply-chain conduct and tax practices therefore hold real but marginal levers on an outcome that public budgets and teachers deliver.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- 250 million children out-of-school: What you need to know about UNESCO's latest education data, UNESCO, 2023-09-19
- Pearson, ETS, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill Lobby Big and Profit Bigger from School Tests, Center for Media and Democracy (PR Watch), 2015-03-30
- Notice of Exempt Solicitation: Stride, Inc. stockholder proposal regarding a report on lobbying, SEIU Pension Plans Master Trust via SEC EDGAR, 2023-10-30
- Ending Child Labor in Cocoa Production, Proxy Preview (Tulipshare), 2023-03-21
- Civil society groups celebrate IFC's divestment from profit-driven school chain Bridge International Academies, Oxfam International, 2022-03-16
- Stolen futures: the impacts of tax injustice on the Right to Education, Tax Justice Network, Education Out Loud and TaxEd Alliance, 2024-10-31
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed and refiled a resolution at Mondelez asking it to strengthen monitoring of child labour in its cocoa supply chain, the practice that keeps West African children out of school.
Demand that Mondelez End Child Labour in Cocoa Production, Tulipshare, 2023
Filed a lobbying disclosure proposal at the virtual charter school operator Stride, seeking disclosure of its lobbying policies, direct and indirect expenditures, grassroots lobbying and payments to tax-exempt groups that draft model legislation.
2 campaigns on record
Strengthen child labour monitoring in the cocoa supply chain, including through distributed ledger and blockchain traceability technology.
Result: 19.8 percent in favour
Tulipshare stated the support level allowed it to refile the proposal at the 2024 annual meeting.
Demand that Mondelez End Child Labour in Cocoa Production, Tulipshare, 2023
Disclose lobbying policies, direct and indirect lobbying expenditures, grassroots lobbying communications, memberships and payments to tax-exempt organisations that draft model legislation, and the board and management processes for approving those payments.
Result: Put to a vote at the annual meeting of 10 December 2021; result not stated in source
we found no documented change
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Doughnut Economics's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.