Project to Seek High-Poverty Schools’ Best Practices

Jon Schnur favors rewarding educators in carefully thought-out ways for significantly increasing their students’ performance.

But as the co-founder and chief executive officer of the group New Leaders for New Schools, he saw a new federal grant program designed to steer schools in that direction as the opportunity to do much more.

As a result, his organization, which recruits and trains promising leaders to be principals, proposed a national project that would launch an entirely new, largely Web-based tool for sharing the best educational practices of urban schools. Schoolwide awards would be paid for dramatic increases in achievement, but educators would also earn bonuses for...