Parents, teachers, researchers and education decision -makers are all affected. “Eric’s financing would limit public access to critical research on education, obstruct practices based on evidence and vital informed political decisions for the progress of American education,” sent an e-mail to Gladys Cruz, a superintendent of a school district called Questar III BoCes outside Albany, New York, and a former president of AASA, Association.
Proposal to make the cost by half
Pollard Young said that before leaving the Education Department, she worked frantically to comply with Doge’s demand to reduce Eric’s annual budget, from $ 5.5 million to $ 2.25 million. The cuts were painful. It should reduce 45% of journals added to the database each year. The public assistance service would be eliminated. And Pollard Young had agreed to personally assume the additional task of communicating directly with 1,500 publishers, which had been managed by AEM Education Services, a supplier who collects, analyzes and manages government data.
These proposed cuts did not satisfy Doge. Pollard Young said she had received an answer by email in all the ceilings, “it is not approved”, with a more important request for information. Pollard Young submitted additional information but never received an answer. She lost access to her work email about a week later on March 11, the day Pollard Young and more than 1,300 other employees of the Ministry of Education lost their jobs in a mass dismissal.
Pollard Young was the only employee in the education department to have been involved with Eric on a daily basis. She supervised a team of 30 entrepreneurs at Aem Education Services, who did most of the work. The addition of documents to the digital library involves many steps, determining their importance to catalog and index. It is the metadata, or descriptive tags, that Ems in the backstage which allows the documents on Eric to be discoverable and to climb to the top of Google research. But the public can also search directly on the Eric website.
“Funny fact”, Paige Kowalski, executive vice-president of data quality campaign, an organization that advocates data-based decision-making in schools, published on Linkedin. “During the 20 years that DQC existed, we have had poorly designed websites with atrocious research functions. I often did not find resources I have written! But I could always find them on Eric. Huge resource. “
Most of the collection consists of articles of academic journals. Many are full -text PDFs which would otherwise be inaccessible behind the payment halls. Eric also contains books, federal, state and local relationships and doctoral theses.
Gray literature
One of his jewels is the large quantity of “gray literature”, which Pollard Young described as unpublished studies of private research organizations and school district reports that are not cataloged in EBSCO, a private database of academic documents. This is another reason why Google and AI cannot simply replace this organized Eric collection. “In education, so much research is produced outside the journals,” said Pollard Young. “The major Grandes ECR (randomized controlled trials) are in white buses”, or special reports.
In response to specific questions about the future of Eric, the Department of Education has responded more widely to the need to restructure the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), where Eric is managed. “Despite the hundreds of millions of millions of taxpayer funds each year, the IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational results and close gaps for students,” said Madi Biedermann, deputy communications assistant secretary, in a declaration sent by email. “The ministry actively evaluates the way of restructuring the EI with the contribution of existing leadership and expert stakeholders so that the Institute provides more useful data to improve the results of students while maintaining scientific integrity and rigorous profitability.”
It is always possible that DOGE approves the reduced budget proposal this week before the money is exhausted. But there will be no one in the education department to supervise it or communicate with the publishers. “The best scenario, Eric operates half of his budget,” published Pollard Young on Linkedin.
Like other employees in the education department who were dismissed in March, Pollard Young is on administrative leave until June. But she said that she was ready to risk potential reprisals of the administration and to talk about the threat file for Eric, which she has succeeded for more than a dozen years.
“I am aware of some of the consequences,” said Pollard Young. “But for me, it is important that the field knows that I do everything in my power to save Eric and also for the country to understand what is happening. While I speak to people across the country, it is clear that they do not fully understand what is happening at DC, hopefully, we can put pressure on it so that we can keep the funding or bring it back.”
