When you’re on the hunt for research on four-day school weeks or how to teach fractions, or trying to track down a historical document like the Coleman Report of 1966, you might turn to Google. But what makes those top-notch research results show up in your Google search? Well, it’s all thanks to something called ERIC lurking behind the scenes.
ERIC, which stands for Education Resources Information Center, is like a fancy online library housing a whopping 2.1 million educational documents. It’s funded and managed by the U.S. Education Department, dating back to the swinging 1960s when it used to be distributed to libraries on microfiche. Nowadays, it’s a free-for-all website where anyone can search, read online, or download material without needing a library card or login. It’s like the MedLine or PubMed of the education world, catering to an estimated 14 million people a year (including yours truly).
This critical online library is supposed to keep chugging along under a five-year contract until 2028. Initially, ERIC dodged the bullet when the Education Department went on a cancellation spree in February. However, according to Erin Pollard Young, the Education Department’s ERIC guru until her position got the axe in March, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has since put the kibosh on releasing already approved funds for the upcoming year.
Come April 23, ERIC is set to run out of dough. After that, no new documents can be added, and the contract is on life support. “After 60 years of gathering hard-to-find education literature and sharing it far and wide, the website could stop getting updates,” lamented Pollard Young on LinkedIn. “Sure, the data’s backed up in a million places, and the website may stay up for a bit. But without the constant TLC and updates, we’re looking at losing a boatload of information.”
Parents, teachers, researchers, and education bigwigs are all sweating bullets. “Cutting ERIC’s funding would put a damper on public access to crucial education research, throwing a wrench into evidence-based practices and informed policy decisions crucial for the future of American education,” warned Gladys Cruz, superintendent of Questar III BOCES, a school district outside Albany, and former prez of the AASA, The School Superintendents Association.
Pollard Young spilled the tea that before her Education Department departure, DOGE was pushing for ERIC’s annual budget to be sliced in half, from $5.5 million to $2.25 million. Ouch. That meant slashing 45 percent of the journals added each year and axing the public help desk. On top of that, Pollard Young was volunteered to take on the job of directly talking to 1,500 publishers, a task previously handled by AEM Education Services, a government data management vendor.
But even these grim cuts didn’t pass muster with DOGE. Pollard Young was hit with an email reply in all caps: “THIS IS NOT APPROVED.” She submitted more info as requested but was met with radio silence. A week later, on March 11, she lost access to her work email, along with over 1,300 other Education Department employees in a mass pink slip party.
Pollard Young was the lone wolf at the Education Department handling ERIC day in and day out. She supervised a team of 30 contractors at AEM Education Services, who did the heavy lifting. Adding documents to the digital library involves multiple steps, from assessing their importance to cataloging and indexing. It’s the metadata, those fancy descriptive tags, that AEM slips in behind the scenes to make ERIC documents searchable and Google-friendly. But Joe Schmo can also search directly on the ERIC website.
“Here’s a little nugget for you,” Paige Kowalski, Data Quality Campaign’s executive VP, shared on LinkedIn. “In the 20 years DQC has been around, we’ve dealt with some real snooze-fest websites with search functions straight out of the Stone Age. I’d be tearing my hair out trying to find my own resources! But ERIC? Boom, there they were. Super handy resource.”
Most of the collection is academic journal articles, many of them full-text PDFs that would otherwise be locked behind paywalls. ERIC also houses books, government reports, and doctoral dissertations galore.
One of ERIC’s hidden gems is its treasure trove of “gray literature,” aka unpublished studies from private research groups and school district reports not found in EBSCO, a private academic database. That’s why Google and AI can’t just waltz in and replace ERIC’s curated collection. “In education, a ton of research lives outside the realm of journals,” Pollard Young explained. “All those big, fancy RCTs are tucked away in white papers and special reports.”
When the Education Department was probed about ERIC’s future, they gave a vague response about restructuring the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), ERIC’s home base. Madi Biedermann, the deputy assistant secretary for communications, threw some shade, saying, “IES hasn’t exactly been hitting home runs with all that taxpayer cash they get each year. We’re mulling over how to shake up IES with input from the bigwigs and experts so it can serve up juicier data to states, all while keeping things legit and cost-effective.”
There’s still a glimmer of hope that DOGE might give the nod to the reduced budget proposal before the money well runs dry. But with no one at the Education Department to oversee or chat with publishers, it’s all a bit up in the air. “Best-case scenario, ERIC limps along at half its budget,” Pollard Young sighed on LinkedIn.
Like her fellow Education Department comrades who got the boot in March, Pollard Young is on ice till June. But she’s ready to stick her neck out, despite potential backlash, to shine a light on the ERIC crisis she’s been wrangling for over a dozen years.
“I know there could be consequences,” Pollard Young admitted. “But it’s crucial for folks in the field to know I’m giving it my all to save ERIC and for the country to see what’s going down. From what I’ve gathered talking to folks nationwide, the D.C. scene is a bit of a mystery. Maybe if we ruffle some feathers, we can keep the funds flowing or even bring ’em back.”
