Students in nearly all academic courses about education learn about the ERIC database. Maintained by the Department of Education, the open access ERIC website has been the point of access to a decades-deep collection of full-text PDFs of published research, to reports from states, school districts and nonprofits involved in education, to theses and dissertations and books. A team of contractors coordinated with publishers, screened documents for inclusion and then - crucially – added meta data so that the massive data base could be quickly and accurately searched by its 14 million users. Journalists, activists, families, teachers, and students all have routinely used ERIC.
Past tense.
Because now funding for ERIC may end this week.
Unnamed "DOGE" staffers earlier demanded an arbitrary 50% budget cut to the unit maintaining ERIC and then declared that that cut was not enough. The sole remaining staffer supporting ERIC was put on administrative leave in March and her access to work email was revoked.
A Department of Education spokesperson whose prior work in education was a year as comms staff at state education department issued a statement that ERIC had failed to identify best practices for improving schools (though that was not its mission) and will be restructured to provide "more useful data to improve student outcomes" in more cost- effective ways. And something about "rigorous scientific integrity".
The best case scenario is that ERIC will continue with an arbitrary 50% budget cut; the worst case scenario is that it will be gone after this week.
We cannot fix what we cannot see. We cannot improve schools for poor and working-class students when we no longer have access to scholarship and data. We cannot pretend that these students will be better served by people with no background in education decide what counts as "scientific rigor"while cutting off the massive data base indexing documents going back to the 60s.
We've long neglected the work of teaching poor and working-class students to be advocates on their own behalf. So please contact your congressional reps on their behalf today to urge them to demand that congressional appropriations for ERIC be honored and that ERIC continue as a public resource.
5calls makes it easy for you to call. Resistbot makes it even easier to write/text your reps.
