Schools

I would like you to try and read California's proposed budget for our k-12 school system. Please try, I gave myself a migraine trying to go through it and make some sort of sense on how they distribute money to our schools who teach the youth of our state. I couldn't figure it out, maybe i should have paid better attention in my economics class. From what I was able to gather, the system works on a per pupil basis, in that case each student is paid for by state at a cost of $7,358 per student. This all  totals to a 66.4 Billion Dollar K-12 Budget for the 2010-11 school year. Compare this to the $11,000 spent per inmate in state penitentiaries, or even $15,000 per inmate at juvenile detention centers. Now although the budget does not clarify what the total cost of the detention center budget is, the fact that the amount is double that of per student cost probably means that its not a small budget. Should it concern us that the state is spending so much on our prison system then our educational system, which could potentially keep people from entering our prison systems. How California decides to distribute our money effects all of us, and how our state is able to operate. Do you think its right for the state to spend more money on Prisons then Schools?