You know the easiest way to tell that U.S. schools have gotten back to their prepandemic normal? It’s that when they’re in the news these days, it’s mostly for familiar reasons: because they’re bearing the awful consequences of American gun culture or hosting culture wars about censoring books. We’ve largely slouched back to the status quo—schools are open, and there’s little sustained effort to substantively alter how they function. Insofar as we’re talking about K–12 teaching and learning now, we’re rehashing another evergreen education conversation: fretting about a possible shortage of U.S. teachers.
But appearances can be deceiving. Much of the apparent K–12 business as usual has been the result of an immense splash of federal emergency funding through Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief. At the end of September, that funding sunsets—all funds must be “obligated,” which is to say districts must have committed, via their budgets, to a plan to spend them by Jan. 28, 2025. As a result, over the next few school years, the national public education picture is going to change considerably, forcing families, educators, administrators, and public officials to make difficult choices about how public schools will operate.
ESSER made for a sea change in federal education resources, brought about via a series of three bills, passed in 2020 and 2021, plowing about $190 billion into the nation’s public education. For context, the U.S. Department of Education’s K–12 budget usually works out to just over $40 billion a year; that covers everything the department does, from offering grants to support schools serving communities of concentrated poverty to supplying resources for English-learning students to providing services to students with disabilities.
Since March 2020, those ESSER funds have sustained the country’s public schools through immensely turbulent years. During the Trump administration, ESSER funds enabled schools’ purchase of the technology necessary for virtual learning along with emergency support services for students and staff. In 2021 the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan generated the last—and, at $122 billion, the largest—round of ESSER funding, which financed school-reopening efforts and programming aimed at improving students’ mental well-being and fostering academic recovery.
In the years between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in many states had grown accustomed to flat, or shrinking, budgets. ESSER changed everything. Indeed, the sudden influx of resources was so unprecedented that some communities initially struggled to spend the money. But over time, schools adjusted to the new reality, improving their facilities, adding learning technologies, and implementing new curricula and teacher trainings.
Schools also added staff: tutors, after-school coordinators, and more teachers—often to reduce class sizes. Between 2021 and 2023, surveys from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, consistently found that solid majorities of districts used their ESSER funds to increase staff capacity.
North Carolina’s Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, for instance, received upwards of $230 million in ESSER grants. WS/FCS put nearly $100 million of those into “Accelerating Learning for Students,” and another $72 million into “Recruitment, Development, & Retention of Talent.” From the 2021–22 to 2022–23 school year, the district brought on more than 400 additional staff, nearly 140 of which were financed through federal grants.
But ESSER was, at its base, emergency funding—and the country has largely decided that the pandemic emergency is over. Districts have until Sept. 30 to commit their final funds to various recovery efforts, then American public schools enter a new budget reality more akin to their prepandemic situation.
And yet, it won’t be quite the same. School budgets are dwindling in many communities as student enrollment shrinks—usually because of a combination of lower birth rates and conservative policies diverting education funding to private schools. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools enrollment dropped by roughly 2,000 students between 2019 and 2023.
ESSER’s end will put K–12 schools squarely into an era of trade-offs. Many districts will have to decide whether to continue pandemic recovery efforts like tutoring programs, after-school academic programs, summer learning opportunities, and social–emotional supports. Some districts, including WS/FCS, are having to choose whether to dismiss teachers or forestall staff raises.
And this is just the first level of difficulty. When budget shortfalls cost staff positions, districts will face further headaches in determining which teachers, schools, communities, and students will bear the bulk of the reductions. In many places, this will mean that recent hires will be most likely to lose their positions—these educators tend to work in schools serving historically marginalized populations and be more racially diverse.
Fortunately, the Sept. 30 ESSER “cliff” isn’t nearly as sharp as it sounds, says researcher Chad Aldeman. Many districts used ESSER funds to shore up their finances, which leaves them in relatively strong fiscal health. Although K–12 hiring will probably slow this fall compared with last fall, 2025 is when schools will truly start to reflect the impacts of the depleted federal money. By then, Aldeman says, “districts will basically [just] be doing replacement hiring—and they definitely won’t be growing. Some places will be having to shrink. So that’s the sort of moment where we get back to balance, back to where we were. [But] balance is a hard one—because it begs the question of: Balance compared to what? Balance compared to 2019? Balance compared to 2010?”
That gets at the uncertainty lurking for schools—and policymakers—as ESSER ends: What was the program’s actual goal?
Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy and governance for AASA, says that ESSER “was never intended to close all achievement gaps. It was intended to get schools back to where they were pre-COVID, and people don’t want to wrestle with the uncomfortable truth [that] if you did the heroic work to get back to pre-COVID, you still have a lot of glaring achievement gaps.” Further, she says, local education leaders tell her: “The impacts of COVID are still in school. The kids schools have now are not the ones they had before COVID.”
If ESSER was ultimately about reopening and restarting American public education, it’s a relatively clear success. Schools have been pretty universally reopened since fall 2021. For better or worse, much of the education technology that facilitated virtual pandemic learning has been integrated into in-person learning as well.
By contrast, it’s apparent that ESSER didn’t fully reestablish the prepandemic status quo for kids. Early returns suggest that the program may have blunted the worst of the pandemic’s effect on student achievement. The Education Recovery Scorecard, a project led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities, hints at a nuanced set of outcomes. In general, their model found that for each additional $1,000 in per-student funding that ESSER provided, there were modest achievement boosts equivalent to roughly six additional days of learning in math and three additional days of learning in reading.
But this finding belies significant variation between districts. In 2019 WS/FCS students scored, on average, slightly below the national average in math. In 2022, when reopened schools made it possible to administer math tests again, the district’s math scores had fallen to nearly 1.4 grade levels below that 2019 national benchmark. A year later, WS/FCS students had made impressive progress—reducing the gap by nearly half, to just three-quarters of a year behind the national average. However, in neighboring Stokes County Schools, the patterns were much different. Math scores there dropped by nearly two-thirds of a grade level from 2019–22 but showed almost no improvement from 2022–23.
The researchers imply that these patterns may reflect the varying effectiveness of different strategies districts pursued: “We conclude that many districts spent the pandemic relief dollars in ways which boosted student achievement,” they write. “But that is different from saying that the dollars had as much impact as they could have had.” ESSER funds helped schools succeed because they were new, supplemental resources, but they were particularly effective when schools used them in especially effective ways. The amount of money mattered—but it mattered more when it was spent better.
That’s why the next few years could be a watershed moment in public education. Schools no longer need sustained boosts in federal funding to supply in-person instruction during the 2024–25 school year—or to offer a standard school day, week, and year that feels like the prepandemic normal to students and families.
But schools are about to have to shrink their spending back to prepandemic levels—and perhaps even further if their enrollment levels have dropped. This will entail making tough choices, like deciding whether to retain new staff brought on with ESSER funds or provide teachers with raises, or whether to continue ESSER-backed after-school programs or keep additional mental-health staff on campuses. A recent American Institutes for Research study found evidence that districts spent considerable ESSER funds on new teaching staff and warned that “it is also likely … that the end of ESSER will also lead to significant staff and teacher layoffs.” Remember that teaching shortage? If teachers have been harder to find in recent years, that may been a reflection of an ESSER-fueled hiring boom that’s about to end.
In other words, schools will have to pick which pandemic-era, ESSER-funded supports they want to keep. This gets somewhat easier if public officials are able to increase resources for public education. “Our schools can’t get better if they’re being underfunded. So this is really an opportunity for the public to continue to weigh in, make that case, and to put pressure honestly on state leaders to make deeper investments in their schools,” says Education Trust policy researcher Qubilah Huddleston.
Still, ESSER was such a dramatic increase in K–12 resources that it’s highly unlikely most communities will be able to fully replace it. That means that the Sept. 30 deadline will kick off an era when teachers, administrators, and policymakers will have to focus their (limited) attention, energy, and resources on rebuilding public education systems that give children the best possible chance to finish what ESSER started: to fully close the academic gulfs that opened during the pandemic.
