COVID Relief

As ESSER Spending Ramps Up, Experts Offer Tips to Make Sure Students Truly Benefit, Now and Later

Advice from Education Leaders Includes Emphasis on Equity, Do’s and Don’ts for Procurement, Avoiding a ‘Fiscal Cliff’ and Ensuring Sustainability

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 04/11/23

Last fall, education headlines across the country expressed alarm at the slow pace at which the nation’s K–12 schools were spending their $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds.

As reported by Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and its ESSER spending tracker, “most districts underspent at the front end, leaving the bulk of the cash for the final two years of the ESSER spending period.”

The first deadline for ESSER I has already passed; ESSER II funds totaling about $55 billion must be allocated by Sept. 30, 2023 and spent by Jan. 31, 2024. ESSER III funds, totaling $122 billion from the American Rescue Plan, must be allocated by Sept. 30, 2024 and spent by Jan. 31, 2025. (ED officials have said states can request an extension for liquidating the funds; 12 states have requested and received extensions.)

About 66% of ESSER II funds had been allocated as of early February, according to ED’s ED’s Education Stabilization Fund Transparency Portal; about 25% of the $91 billion in ESSER III funds had been allocated at that time.

For perspective: School districts get about $43 billion annually from the federal government, noted Discovery Education in an ESSER spending guide it published last month. “So, states and districts were provided 3.5 times their annual federal funding in stimulus funding to spend, as well as the annual funding itself,” states the guide, entitled “Innovative, Impactful, and Sustainable Use of Federal Stimulus Funds.”

Now, it seems school districts have been spending those funds much faster this school year: the nation’s K–12 schools “are on track to spend down ESSER funds by the relative deadlines,” Edunomics Director Marguerite Roza, Ph.D., wrote in a recent opinion article for Forbes. As of last month, ESSER funds were being spent at about $5.1 billion per month, according to Edunomics Lab’s tracker.

Discovery Education and several other education organizations have published guides to help district leaders efficiently evaluate — or re-evaluate — their options when making procurement decisions particularly with ESSER funds. Tips on what to look for in a new ed tech solution, budgeting tips to make the most of the time-limited cash influx, and questions to ask about any ESSER-funded program are among those guides, all of which are summarized below. 

Meanwhile, Edunomics’ Roza continues calling for a “North Star” for the nation’s public education system: Actual improvements in learning outcomes. In numerous op-eds and blog posts over recent months, Roza calls on education leaders at all levels to improve data collection and analysis and to demand data-driven decision-making, spending on what is actually working to improve learning and leaving the rest behind.

“The concern with slower spending up front was, and has always been: First, is the money being deployed in a way that gets students back on track? And second, are leaders planning ahead so the district isn’t derailed by a fiscal cliff in 2024?” Roza wrote in the recent Forbes piece. “Districts have left themselves little time for onboarding new hires, tweaking programs to ensure they’re working and changing course when they aren’t. And if the chosen interventions don’t do enough to help students, there’s precious little time for a do-over. … As the aid clock runs down, we need to focus not on what is allowed, but on what investments are showing progress for students. District and school leaders must tap data, map and measure progress, and pivot on a dime to switch gears if an investment isn’t impacting learning.”

In the absence of real-time data on student progress — which Roza also suggested every state education department should be implementing especially since getting their own ESSER funds — district leaders can use Edunomics’ “The Grid” worksheet to assess the impact and results from investments. 

And as the nation’s school leaders consider how to spend $5 billion per month for the next year and a half or so, some basic principles are shared below, offered as spending guidelines and tips by EdTrust, Discovery Education, Edunomics, and the School Superintendents Association.