The quality of local schools is an important factor when buying a new home or relocating a business. Yet, for most communities, the only resources available on school performance are confusing government reports as thick as phone books, written in a bureaucratic language that few understand.

But thanks to a new policy, Mainers are now given information on school performance using easy-to-understand report cards with the same A, B, C, D and F designations used in student grades.

It’s a system that truly motivates parents and the community to get involved by simply taking information that education officials have had for years and presenting it in a way that is more easily understood.

Armed with a true snapshot of school performance, parents will be empowered to work with schools to create a path to improvement. Parents and teachers will be able to see the result of their hard work each year through improving letter grades.

At its core, Maine’s new school grading system draws on similar systems in more than a dozen other states that evaluate schools on three fundamental components: student performance and progress in reading and math, and graduation rates in high school.

Schools earn half of their grade based on the number of students who are reading and performing math on grade level. But basing a school’s entire grade on grade-level performance is unfair to schools that receive students who are significantly behind. That’s why Maine wisely bases the other half of the grade on learning gains and improvements made by students, with extra emphasis in grades K-8 given to gains made by the lowest performers.

This policy levels the playing field between affluent and low-income students.

By incentivizing learning gains and improvements, schools for the first time will be rewarded for taking students who are significantly behind and moving them closer to grade level. Likewise, schools with historically-high-performing student populations will no longer be able to hang their hat on meeting grade-level cut scores — they will have to ensure that even high-performing students are not stagnating.

It’s a policy that rewards getting students to grade level as well as the progress made toward getting them there.

This is evident in Florida — the state that pioneered the school grading policy in 1999. Of the schools that earned an A or B in the Sunshine State last year, 61 percent were schools where at least half of the students came from low-income families.

Not only has this reform made a difference at the state level, but also in the nation’s urban school districts, which serve a large number of low-income and minority students.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2011 Trial Urban District Assessment, New York City was among the highest performing districts in terms of the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced lunch who scored “proficient or better” in reading. New York City outperformed 17 other districts in the fourth-grade reading assessment and 15 other districts in the eighth-grade reading assessment.

Also ranked as top performers on the TUDA were Miami-Dade and Hillsborough (Tampa) counties in Florida which, like New York City, operate under an A-F school grading system.

Despite all the reasons this policy makes sense, there are still those who oppose it. They will say that no system is perfect and that no system can adequately capture all the factors that make up a school’s performance.

But that is not an argument against grading schools. If it were, we would no longer grade students on their performance either.

The fact is, there are important and fundamental aspects to our education system — like reading and math — and allowing schools to escape responsibility for producing results in these areas is no benefit to schoolchildren.

School grades are no panacea, but they are an important step in creating a transparent system that holds schools accountable for students. To begin with, these grades help us to identify which schools are doing a great job, so that we can learn from those successes and scale them up.

Such grades can also provide an early warning about which schools are struggling, so that we can best target additional help and resources to those that need them the most, while further providing structural changes when persistent under-performance requires as much.

Transparency and accountability are not easy pills to swallow, especially for those being held accountable. But positive things will happen when schools organize around the singular focus of student learning.

Joel I. Klein is a member of the board of directors of the Foundation for Excellence in Education and former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. He is currently CEO of Amplfy, the education division of News Corporation. Betsy DeVos is a member of the board of directors of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and a life-long education reformer and philanthropist.