"A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student."

FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.

Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.

In Chicago subrubs school funding is largely based on local property taxes. Expensive neighborhoods have better funded schools. Of course there's also federal funding for poor schools so really the worst funded schools are the ones where everyone is lower middle class but the best funded schools are in the richest districts. Of course as you point out parental involvement is more important than funding, but they tend to be correlated and funding still matters.

I'm glad that's how it works where you live. In Illinois, most school funding comes directly from property taxes, meaning rich areas get more.

For state funding, they use a system called EBF which is better than straightforwardly giving out money based on local property taxes. However, it is far from fair. As an example, part of the calculation is what's called a "regionalization factor" - where funding is reduced for areas with lower local average incomes.

Then "school district fraud" shouldn't be a problem. If a parent is willing to committing a crime to get their kid into a good school, they're heavily engaged and involved.