The deadline for districts to assign any remaining pandemic relief money to specific projects is Sept. 30. This impending deadline for ESSER, which provided $189.5 billion to schools during and after the pandemic, has been dubbed the ESSER funding cliff, as it represents such a steep and sudden drop in school funding.
The third and final round of pandemic relief funds made $122 billion available to schools in March 2021 to be used within three and a half years. Most of that money went into two buckets — labor and vendor contracts — according to Dr. Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she and her team track ESSER spending in school districts nationwide.
With the funding cliff now fast approaching, schools will have to decide which bucket to dump. Roza said she expects vendor contracts, which often pertain to school technology, to be among the first to go.
“They typically tend to prioritize retention of employees even if a better outcome for the students would be to keep the vendor contract,” she said. “It’s always easier for them to cut a vendor contract than it is to cut an employee.”
However, Roza said schools need to focus less on what’s easiest or how things have been done in the past and more on what’s best for students, many of whom are still struggling to recover from pandemic learning loss.
“It’s going to be incumbent on school districts to figure out how to leverage the resources they have to drive the maximum amount of improvement they can for their kids,” Roza said.
CONNECTING INVESTMENTS TO OUTCOMES
According to an Edunomics Lab analysis of ESSER funding and student test scores, investing money to hire more school staff does not always correlate with improved student outcomes, nor does more spending per pupil in general.
“In states like Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, districts posted stronger progress alongside investments,” according to a recent newsletter from the Edunomics Lab. “Meanwhile in Nevada, South Dakota and Washington, districts’ average math scores barely budged, and reading scores were flat or continued to fall, even as more money and staffing rained down on systems.”
Experts say the difference may come down to whether state education leaders prioritize academic recovery and actively seek evidence of student progress to inform their spending decisions. This means tracking specific investments to see if they yield returns in the form of improved student outcomes.
Roza said connecting investments to outcomes is not common practice in education finance but needs to be, especially now that districts have reached the edge of the ESSER funding cliff — with no widespread academic recovery in sight.
She said her team at the Georgetown University education finance research center has been listening in on school board meetings throughout the U.S. to see if they raise the topic of student outcomes in discussing what to keep and what to cut now that ESSER is ending.
“You see a lot of districts saying, ‘Well, we’re cutting what we can from the budget’ — this vendor contract ends so we can cut that — but not actually doing that part where we talk about what do we choose to keep if what we’re prioritizing is student outcomes,” Roza said. “In fact, we don’t hear about student outcomes at all during some of these budget-cutting meetings.”
CULLING ED-TECH TOOLS
Given that the number of ed-tech tools used per district has increased by more than 225 percent since the 2018-19 school year, according to a 2024 report from LearnPlatform by Instructure, it may be tempting for schools to allow many of these tools to simply fall off the budget as their vendor contracts end.
However, industry experts echo Roza and her team at Georgetown University, saying districts must take a strategic approach and use data to inform decisions about which tools to cull as they face the ESSER funding cliff.
Melissa Loble, chief academic officer of ed-tech software company Instructure and board chair of the nonprofit collaborative 1EdTech, said there are a number of factors schools should focus on to evaluate their technology, such as redundancy, security, outcomes and usage.
“Let’s make sure we’re not buying too many of the same thing, let’s make sure we are using things that are safe and secure, and then let’s make sure these are actually producing better outcomes,” she said. “And also take a look at just utilization.”
Usage data on an ed-tech tool can include how often it’s being used, by whom and for how long, Loble said, which can help districts determine the value of an investment.
To further measure the caliber of an ed-tech tool, school staff can look to see whether the technology meets specific industry standards, or has third-party validation for qualities such as safety, evidence, usability, inclusivity and interoperability.
One resource for this, the EdTech Index, aims to create a central place for schools to see what credentials a tool has earned in these areas. It features a database of more than 1,700 products. Under the validations tab, users can find a description of ed-tech credentials and the organizations that offer them.
GOODBYE ESSER
Although schools must obligate remaining ESSER funds to specific projects by Sept. 30, they have until the end of January 2025 to spend those assigned funds. In some cases, a special extension may be granted, giving districts until the end of March 2026 to liquidate pandemic relief. Any unused money goes back to the federal government, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Many districts throughout the U.S. have mostly or fully assigned their last round of pandemic relief, the ESSER tracker shows. However, as of press time, there was still money on the table. Nine districts have more than $30 million each left to allocate by the end of this month, the Edunomics Lab reports, and six districts have not yet claimed any money from the final wave of pandemic relief.
