A competitive grant contest through the U.S. Department of Education is undergoing new changes, as entrants — innovators looking to improve America’s schools — must now secure private funding before winning their public grants.

The Investing in Innovation (i3) grant competition will award a total of $150 million to participants who have new ideas that help improve student success. Although this is the fourth i3 competition, it is the first that requires winners to secure a certain amount of private-sector funding before they can gain access to their grant money.

Investing in Innovation is a grant fund created under President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Applicants for the grant must focus their efforts on one of the problem areas the Obama administration has identified in education. According to the Department of Education, the administration values innovations that promise to improve teacher effectiveness, the use of data to enhance student achievement and any innovations that can increase the effectiveness of low-performing schools.

In past years, higher-education institutions won grants for their ideas on how to train teachers: Texas Tech University, for example, won $225,000 for a project that takes new approaches to train teachers and measure their results. Another organization, called the New Teacher Center, won $14.68 million to train future educators to teach in high-poverty school districts.

The Department of Education is offering money for ideas at every stage in the innovation process, breaking the competition into three grant categories. It will offer up to $5 million for projects that are still in the idea stage. Categorized as “development” grants, these require the applicant to have only a “reasonable hypothesis” that seems to have high potential. Development grantees have to fulfill stricter money-raising requirements than applicants with proven ideas. They must secure a private-sector match of 15 percent of their total project budget. Half of the private-sector funding must be raised before the award is given and the other half within six months after the project begins.

The i3 program will also offer funding to innovative education ideas that already have a successful track record. The department calls these grant categories “validation” and “scale-up,” for successful programs that are already underway, but need a boost before they can grow to a regional or national level.

The i3 grant competition hopes to invite as many applicants as possible to pitch their innovative ideas for education. Its pre-application process, which attracted 650 people last year, allows applicants to enter their ideas into a peer-review format. The most highly rated applicants from the peer-review process will make up the finalists in the grant competition, and the Department of Education will announce a list of its finalists after peer reviews are finished. The deadline for applicants to send in a pre-application is April 26.

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