“THE FISCAL CLIFF IS COMING!”
It sure is.
The ESSER funding that the federal government allocated to the states has to be spent down in the next few months. After that, American public education falls off a 190 billion dollar cliff.
As we head towards that cliff, let’s take a peak at the federal data and see where that money went.
First, here is a map that shows how much was allocated to each state.
This provides good context, but it is not the most helpful breakdown, since it basically shows us that California and Texas are highly populous states.
To make this chart more helpful, I’ve supplemented the federal ESSER data with some more federal data about total enrollment in public education per state. Now we can get a look at how much extra each state was able to spend per student.
This is more revealing and useful data. First, it is normally distributed (Shapiro Wilk 0.9885, p=0.899), so we could do some follow-up analyses.