We have a few Title I schools, but no school, K-12, is academically failing.

At the school I work in we have a flourishing IB program, nearly half our students at the high school are in at least one pre-AP or AP course, we have dual credit and over a third of our students go straight to 4-year colleges. And that's 3-4 years after it started demographically transitioning from mostly white, upper-middle-class or rural to having a growing "urban" mix (as my students put it) who are transferring in with serious deficiencies in academics and behaviors.

A nearby district isn't in the sample. Don't know why.

Another nearby district spends over $7100 per year and has numerous failing schools.

The large mega district to our south spends over $7500/year.

Another district further away from the mega district spend just over $6200/year, and many of their schools are better than where I teach.

While individual schools (mostly private) spend a lot more money, the public school systems seem to run in reverse here: the more you spend, the lower the outcomes. Of course, this is an epiphenomenon. Money's funneled to those schools because they are lower achieving, so they have more to spend. Given the $600/student difference between my district and the megadistrict, for my 160 kids there's a $96000 difference (divided between 7 courses, that's $13,700 per course; crap, even having a lot of that go for counseling and rule enforcement, I could stand having a couple of thousand dollars for supplies).

My graduate program was top notch. The library was decent and we had very good faculty. Yet the computers were old, the offices decrepit, and for years after an earthquake you could see daylight through a few places in the wall from cracks. Our one staffer was overworked. The linoleum in some classrooms was worn to the concrete underneath, the ceiling tiles yellowed with age, and the chalkboards original and 70 years old. Yet we had decent hire rates in the field for our discipline, a reasonable graduation rate, and many of our students presented at conferences and were published, sometimes in very good journals. Similarly, now, my students, level and often struggling not to fail, are in a recently remodeled classroom that's well light, while the much higher-achieving parallel AP course is in a classroom that hasn't been painted for 30 years, 30-year-old ceiling tiles and light fixtures and with 20 year old carpets.

Money helps, but there's a tenuous connection between student spending and academic achievement for most students in most schools. That requires getting beyond just focusing on $ as a symbol of equality and seeking the right somebody to blame. We seem to assume that the "right focus" + the existing correlation =/= causality. We've assumed that for 50 years now, and while we have a lot of very expensive underperforming schools and have more than doubled funding in real dollars, we haven't seen the predicted results. That's fine for humanities and some social sciences, but if you're in STEM and a hypothesis consistently fails to make accurate predictions, it's time to revise the hypothesis.