Nearly 2,500 districts, schools, and nonprofits representing every state have indicated they plan to compete for an Investing in Innovation grant, setting up a furious fight over $650 million in federal economic-stimulus money that is designed to scale up creative solutions to education's most vexing problems. The large group of prospective applicants, which notified the U.S. Department of Education by April 1 that they planned to apply, foreshadows where the stiffest competition will be: for "scaleup" grants of up to $50 million, the largest slices of "i3" aid. Eighty-seven prospective applicants said they would apply for what's likely to be just five or fewer awards. The likely applicants say they are more inclined to focus their innovative proposals on standards and assessments and low-performing schools--two of the four categories, which reflect priorities of the Obama administration. There will likely be fewer applications in the other two areas: improvement of data systems and teacher and principal effectiveness. The i3 grant program is a companion to the larger, more widely publicized $4 billion Race to the Top competition for states. But the i3 program sets aside $650 million just for districts, groups of schools, and their nonprofit partners to pursue and scale up innovative reform strategies through three tiers of grants, with the biggest awards going to the proposals with the strongest research evidence of past success.