ESSER Funding and School System Jobs: Evidence from Job Posting Data
The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest one-time federal investment in K–12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use novel data from Washington State to investigate the extent to which ESSER funding causally influenced spending on school personnel. We argue one cannot infer this directly from ESSER claims data because of the fungibility of school budgets. Thus, we rely on a more direct signal of district hiring decisions: public education job postings scraped from district hiring websites.