The treasure house of educational reporting and research is under threat
Parents, teachers, researchers and educational decision makers are all affected. “Add funds to Eric will limit public access to critical education research, hinder evidence-based practices, and understand policy decisions that are crucial to the development of education in the United States,” the email was Gladys Cruz, principal of Questar III Boces, a school district outside Albany, New York, Questar III Boces, outside New York, and AASA’s past president, AASA, the Association of School Deans.
Proposed to cut costs by half
Pollard Young said she was frantically struggling to comply with cutting Eric’s annual budget in half, from $5.5 million to $2.25 million before leaving the education department. Cutting is painful. Every year, she will have to cut 45% of the journal. Public service desks will be eliminated. Pollard Young has agreed to personally undertake the additional task of directly communicating with 1,500 publishers, handled by AEM Education Services, a provider of collecting, analyzing and managing government data.
These proposed cuts are not satisfied. Pollard Young said she received all cap email responses: “This is not approved” and asked for more information. Pollard Young submitted additional information but never received a reply. About a week later, she lost her job email to access her, namely, Pollard Young and more than 1,300 other education department employees lost their jobs in the massive sack.
Pollard Young is the only Ministry of Education employee who participates with ERIC every day. She oversees a team of 30 contractors made up of AEM Education Services, which does most of the work. Adding documents to a digital library involves many steps, from determining their importance to cataloging and indexing them. What AEM inserts behind the scenes is metadata or descriptive tags, allowing documents on Eric to be discovered and rise to the top in Google searches. But the public can also search directly on the ERIC website.
“Interesting facts,” Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality campaign, which advocates publishing data-driven school decisions on LinkedIn. “In the 20 years that DQC has been around, we have some poorly designed websites with cruel search capabilities. I often can’t find the resources I wrote! But they are always found on Eric. Huge resources.”
The majority of the series consists of academic journal articles. Many are full-text PDFs, otherwise the paywall will not be accessible behind it. Eric also contains books, federal, state and local government reports, and doctoral dissertations.
Gray literature
One of its gemstones is a large number of “gray literature” that Pollard Young describes as unpublished studies reported by private research organizations and school districts that are not classified in EBSCO (EBSCO) (a database of private academic documents). This is another reason Google and AI can’t simply replace this selected ERIC collection. “In education, a lot of research is done outside of journals,” said Pollard Young. “The big and important RCT [randomized controlled trials] in the white paper” or special report.
To answer specific questions about the future of ERIC, the Education Department responded more broadly to the needs of the Institute for Reorganization of the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES), which was managed there. “Although hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually on taxpayer funding, the IES has not effectively fulfilled its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches to improve the gap in educational outcomes and close achievement for students,” Madi Biedermann said in an emailed statement. “The ministry is actively evaluating how IE can be reorganized through input from existing leadership and expert stakeholders so that the institute can provide states with more useful data to improve student outcomes while maintaining strict scientific integrity and cost-effectiveness.”
Doge still has the potential to approve a budget proposal for this week’s reduction before funds run out. However, no one in the Ministry of Education can supervise it or communicate with publishers. “Best case, Eric’s budget is halfway through operation,” Pollard Young posted on LinkedIn.
Like other Ministry of Education employees who were fired in March, Pollard Young is still on administrative leave until June. But she said she was willing to risk potential revenge from the government and spoke on the record about the threat to Eric, who had been in charge for more than a decade.
“I know what the consequences are,” Pollard Young said. “But for me, it’s important to know that I’m doing everything I can to save Eric and also to let the country know what’s going on. When I talk to people all over the country, it’s obvious that they won’t fully understand what’s going on in DC, and hopefully we can put some pressure on that so we can keep the money or bring back the money or bring back it.”
