The Scholastic NOligarchy Profile
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Scholastic earns a NOligarchy Score of 74.1 out of 100 — a result shaped by a clean regulatory record and a minimal presence in Washington, offset by a sustained habit of redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars away from its workforce and toward shareholders. The score reflects a company that plays by the law but has consistently chosen Wall Street payouts over worker earnings.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
74.0
Wealth Extraction
53.8
Playing by the Rules
100.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 74.05/100. Scholastic has a thin but real footprint in Washington — one lobbying filing, no Political Action Committee (PAC), and no revolving-door hires. The spending is modest, but it is there.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 53.65/100. A CEO who earns 85 times the median worker’s salary, combined with hundreds of millions in stock buybacks over recent fiscal years, drags this score into the lower half.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. A perfect score — no recorded fines, no violations, no public subsidies accepted. Among companies tracked here, that is genuinely rare.
Scholastic ranks 2nd out of 3 companies in the Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers sector, sitting above the sector average of 72.7. Among its industry peers, Scholastic sits in the middle of the pack on accountability. The wealth-extraction picture remains difficult to look past on its own terms.
The Bottom Line: A Children’s Publisher That Chose Buybacks Over Paychecks
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), Scholastic posted $1.625 billion in annual revenue according to SEC EDGAR 10-K (CIK 0000866729). That is enough to make it a significant player in children’s publishing. The sharpest imbalance in Scholastic’s record is not in its lobbying room or its courtroom — it is in the cash it chose to send to shareholders instead of the 6,800 people who stock its book fairs, fill its warehouses, and answer its phones. Over the last two fiscal years, Scholastic poured more than $228 million into buying back its own stock — a sum that towers over the $44,104 median salary it paid its workers. The company has a clean legal record and a quiet presence in Washington, but its payroll decisions tell the real story of who it considers a priority.
A Single Quiet Knock on Washington’s Door
Scholastic’s Washington operation is about as small as it gets for a billion-dollar corporation. The company filed one lobbying disclosure during the two-year period, spending $49,144 in 2025 — all of it in the first quarter of that year — according to its Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filing.
Federal Lobbying Spend by Quarter
$49K total
$49K
Q1 '25
That single filing focused on one issue: postal rates. Specifically, lobbyists filed under the “Postal” issue area, describing concerns about bulk mail pricing, and targeted the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The connection to Scholastic’s core business is direct — the company runs one of the largest book-distribution operations in America, shipping millions of books through school book fairs and direct-mail catalogs. Bulk mail pricing is not an abstract policy question for Scholastic; it is a line item that affects the cost of every flyer that lands on a parent’s kitchen table or every order that ships to a school gymnasium. Lobbyists named no specific bills in this filing.
Scholastic ran no PAC during this period — no corporate money channeled into candidate committees. Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show $1,858 in personal donations from executives and employees who listed Scholastic as their employer — individual contributions that are legally separate from corporate PAC activity. The company hired no outside lobbying firms. For a company this size, that is a genuinely minimal footprint.
Hundreds of Millions for Shareholders, Median Pay of $44,104 for Workers
Scholastic’s CEO pay ratio is 85:1, according to the company’s SEC DEF 14A filing. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $3.7 million. The median Scholastic employee took home $44,104 that same year. Put another way: while a typical Scholastic worker earned enough to cover modest rent and basic household bills, the person at the top collected the equivalent of 85 of those annual salaries — before the workweek was over for the year.
That disparity is stark on its own. But the buyback record makes it harder to ignore.
The Shareholder Payout
Over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, Scholastic spent $158.2 million and $70 million, respectively, buying back its own stock, according to SEC 10-K filings. Buybacks are a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stock market. When Scholastic channeled that money into its buyback program, the overwhelming majority of that benefit flowed to that narrow slice of the population — not to the workers who run its book fairs or package its orders.
On top of buybacks, Scholastic handed investors dividends in both fiscal years — $24.7 million in fiscal year 2024 and $22.6 million in fiscal year 2025.
The Missed Raise
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 6,800 workers a $33,559 raise, spread across the last two fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $16,779 annual raise the company chose not to give.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 6,800
Your share of the buyback
+$33,559
Per biweekly paycheck
+$645.36
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $228.2 million.
Spread across Scholastic's 6,800 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $33,559 per worker — about $645 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 7K employees
Spent on buybacks
$228.2M
directed to shareholders
÷ 7K
workers
Per-worker raise
$33,559
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 38% annual raise on the median worker's $44,104 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The Dividend Factor
Scholastic did not abandon traditional dividends — it ran them alongside its buyback program simultaneously. That means Scholastic was not choosing between investor returns and worker wages: it was already paying investors a steady dividend stream and still deploying hundreds of millions more into buybacks on top of that. The dividend payments went to all shareholders in proportion to their holdings — a broad-based payout. The buyback program, by contrast, concentrates benefits among shareholders who sell at the elevated price: typically institutional funds and executives with stock-based compensation. Running both at the same time is a choice, not a necessity.
Executive Bonuses
Buybacks reduce the total number of shares in circulation. That mechanical effect lifts Earnings Per Share (EPS) — the metric that triggers performance bonuses for senior executives. A CEO who is already earning 85 times the median worker’s salary benefits directly when the board approves a buyback program, because the same decision that rewards shareholders also pumps up the numbers that determine executive pay.
A Clean Record, No Asterisks
On the legal and regulatory front, Scholastic’s record is spotless. No fines. No recorded violations. No public subsidies accepted. The Playing by the Rules score of 100/100 is not a rounding error — it reflects an absence of any enforcement actions or government grants showing up on the public docket during the two-year period tracked here.
That is worth acknowledging plainly. For a company of Scholastic’s scale, with national distribution networks, school-facing sales operations, and a large hourly workforce, a clean regulatory record requires active effort. Scholastic appears to have put that effort in.
The absence of fines does not offset the wealth-extraction picture, but it does distinguish Scholastic from many companies in its revenue tier. There are no courtroom settlements here, no consent decrees, no workplace safety violations — at least none captured in available public records. What remains is a company that follows the rules and, within those rules, consistently chose to enrich its shareholders over the workers who make the books move.