If you want your head to spin, try to figure out how much money we spend each year to educate California’s 6 million K-12 school students.
Official agencies and outside groups publish numbers, but they rarely agree. They either take their snapshots at different times or include different types of spending and/or different sources of financing.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget pegs the number at $63.4 billion during the 2012-13 fiscal year, but assumes that voters approve his sales and income tax increase measure, Proposition 30, on the Nov. 6 ballot.