By the deadline earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education had received nearly 1,700 applications for the $650 million Investing in Innovation fund. The program, known as i3, was created under last year's federal stimulus act.

(A few expected grant applications either on paper and from areas affected by flooding in Tennessee had a few extra days to turn in applications, but it's unlikely to change the number of proposals dramatically. The feds haven't provided an updated applicant figure that we can find. Let us know if you know of one.)

Fundwise, the i3 program is only about a quarter of one of the better-known competitive portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Race to the Top. But it requires winning districts and groups of schools to get private partners to make the innovative ideas reality.

The proposals must expand implementation and investment in ideas and evidence-based practices that improve K-12 achievement and close achievement gaps, decrease dropout rates, increase high school graduation rates, and improve teacher and school leader effectiveness. And the proposals must do one of three things: pledge to use programs with a strong base of evidence that could reach hundreds of thousands of students, known as scale-up grants. They could expand existing programs that have good evidence of their effectiveness but need to expand their evidence base, or validation grants. And then there's the development grants category, which supports new and "high-potential" practices whose impact should be studied further. Based on what prospective applicants said they'd be applying for, most applicants want to apply for the smallest category, the development grants. The Department of Education expects to give out the most validation grants, but there are no rules governing that.

It only took a couple of months to wade through the tomes known as the Race to the Top applications, but there were only 41 of those. And while those apps went public fairly quickly (with the Department of Education making applications public that states were refusing to), we're still waiting to see the i3 collection of ideas. The U.S. Department of Education has until Sep. 30 to hand out all the money. They have said they plan to provide detailed information on all of the applicants, partners, priorities, budgets and descriptions and will create a user-friendly way for the public to run customized reports on the application pool, in the hopes of further inspiring innovative education practices.

We'll be watching for that.