I have looked everywhere for a national dollar per student database. Do you know if such a thing exists?
How I got there: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa... http://www.census.gov/govs/school/
Look at the list of top spending districts, I see two districts with good outcomes (fairfax and Montgomery county) and the rest are urban districts with notoriously bad public schools (plus Hawaii which doesn't have local school districts and has outcomes so bad that pretty much everyone flees to private options, eg Barack Obama).