The article you link indeed shows there's surprising spending levels in some states but this doesn't quite link spending to school performance.

I'm only making this statement because it's sometimes easy to cite a correlation to support a point when there's no causal relationship. Thus, irrespective of how much a school spends per-pupil, it's critical to relate spending to educational outcomes. You could imagine a case, for example, where schools on the East Coast necessarily spend more than schools on the West Coast to maintain old buildings (I'm not saying this is the case, of course).