In 1998, Angela Jerabek, a guidance counselor at a high school outside Minneapolis, grew frustrated watching too many ninth-graders fail courses year after year. Her principal encouraged her to come up with a new strategy to address the problem, knowing that failed classes too often lead students to drop out of high school. By the next school year, Jerabek had developed Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR)--a research-based program that "empowers educators to analyze real-time data and build upon individual strengths to support academic, social, and emotional success for every student." Despite resounding and impressive success at Jerabeck's St. Louis Park High School for more than a decade, the program did not expand beyond that one school. In 2010, when BARR won a grant from the first Investing in Innovation (i3) competition, that changed as the program expanded to a suburban Los Angeles high school and two rural high schools in Maine. Nine years after receiving its first i3 grant, Building Assets, Reducing Risks is now the first program to have climbed through all three levels of the i3 competition. This issue brief speaks to a need in the United States to increase investments in educational research and development, and maintains that the i3/Education Innovation and Research (EIR) model can continue to play a part in identifying, evaluating, and scaling promising innovations. [This issue brief is part of the Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative from the Center for American Progress and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.]