Article 26: Right to education, free and compulsory at elementary level; parents' prior right to choose their children's education
Helpful
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Article 26's central promises, free and compulsory schooling for children and parents' right to choose the kind of education their children receive, are delivered mainly through public education systems and family decisions, not corporate products. Three separate searches for shareholder campaigns on for-profit colleges, school-voucher privatization, or education publishers such as Pearson turned up no documented shareholder resolution addressing this right. There is a real but adjacent corporate problem in the for-profit college sector. Companies like Corinthian Colleges and Bridgepoint Education targeted low-income and veteran students with expensive, poor-outcome programs while lobbying heavily to keep access to federal student aid. They spent roughly $4.5 million on political influence between 2016 and 2018. That shows companies can distort educational opportunity at the college level, but it sits outside the elementary and parental-choice guarantees this article is built around, so the right itself remains a matter for governments and families.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Free, compulsory elementary schooling is overwhelmingly delivered by public systems funded by governments; private and for-profit education providers, textbook and ed-tech publishers touch the margins of the sector but do not decide whether children have access to it.
The for-profit college sector is documented to have spent millions lobbying to preserve access to federal student aid despite poor outcomes for students. That is a real but narrow political-influence problem, concentrated in higher and vocational education rather than the elementary and parental-choice provisions this article centers on.
1 and 1, higher of the two, gives Helpful
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
No shareholder advocacy found yet
We looked and found nothing that met our standard, which is a source we opened and confirmed. No shareholder proposal or investor engagement was located on free and compulsory elementary education or parental choice of education. Searches on the adjacent for-profit college sector, where the rationale notes a real corporate problem, returned accreditation disputes, Department of Education reviews and a Senate HELP Committee report, none of which is shareholder advocacy. Consistent with the rationale's own finding that three earlier searches turned up nothing.
Related subjects on other maps
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 Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.