ESSER Reliance and District Teacher Counts at the September 2024 Obligation Deadline: A Pre-Registered Analysis Whose Placebo Failed

Federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds paid for a big share of US school district spending between 2020 and 2024, and forecasts expected teacher layoffs once the last tranche (ARP ESSER) could no longer be obligated after 30 September 2024. This paper links the NCES F-33 School District Finance Survey for FY2024, which reports spending from each ESSER tranche, to Common Core of Data (CCD) teacher full-time equivalents (FTE) for 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25. CCD staff counts are dated 1 October (or closest school day), so the 2024-25 count, about one day after the deadline, measures staffing at the start of the first post-deadline year. The F-33 ESSER lines are incomplete: in the base sample, 26.8% of districts have all three ESSER expenditure components flagged as missing, stored as zeros. The exposure counts a district only if all three components are flagged as reported by the state, a rule chosen after the registered results were seen (a disclosed deviation). The registration is unpublished; its timing cannot be verified. In 6,330 regular districts in 39 states, each additional percentage point of FY2024 spending financed by ESSER is associated with a 0.073 log-point (x100) smaller change in teacher FTE from October 2023 to October 2024 (95% CI -0.144 to -0.003), conditional on state, enrollment change and size, and locale. The registered falsification check failed: the same specification for October 2022 to October 2023, while ESSER was still being spent, gives -0.133 (95% CI -0.231 to -0.036), against an expectation of zero or above; the difference between periods is 0.060 (95% CI -0.057 to 0.177). Ignoring the flags, as first reported, gave -0.083, -0.139 and 0.056 in 6,630 districts in 42 states. The association is therefore not specific to the deadline and is reported as a conditional cross-sectional association, not an effect.