Esser Funding and School System Jobs: Evidence from Job Posting Data

Abstract

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest onetime federal investment in K–12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use web-scraped job posting data from Washington State to investigate the causal impact of ESSER spending on district hiring between January 2022 and September 2024. We employ an instrumental variables strategy, exploiting idiosyncrasies in the Title I funding formula to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in ESSER. We find strong evidence that ESSER funding significantly increased teacher hiring, and that this impact was greatest during the early ESSER years.

Keywords: school funding, school staffing, teacher hiring