The Basic Education Subsidy is the largest funding stream in education and is used to distribute most of the funding that is available to basic education.

This chart illustrates how federal stimulus funds played a large role in inflating education spending over the past two years.

The red bar shows education investment in state dollars. The 2011-2012 breakdown demonstrates how overall spending is less, but it also shows a $621 million increase in state tax dollars to replace some of the $1.1 billion in federal stimulus money that ended in FY2010-2011.