Gov. Paul LePage was set to hand out report cards to Maine schools this week, kicking off an initiative he says will hold schools accountable and lead communities to rally around those that are falling behind.

LePage announced the plan to grade schools on the familiar A-F standard, copied from a system used in Florida, at his State of the State address in February, and he was planning to unveil the individual grades at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, after The Current’s deadline.

“If grading our schools harms students, then why do we grade our students?,” LePage said in his weekly address on Saturday. “Grades are earned, and just as our children have the ability to improve their grades schools do as well. The goal here is to help every school earn an A.”

If you believe LePage and his education commissioner, Stephen Bowen, the grading system will give parents and other residents a simple way to gauge how their local schools are performing, and it will help direct resources to those schools that aren’t keeping up. The plan’s detractors, mostly Democratic legislators and some education organizations, say the grades will unfairly brand schools that do not perform well by the plan’s standards, which they are argue are too simplistic.

But the grading initiative will have little impact other than to tell communities what they already know. Worse, by putting renewed emphasis on test scores, it could push schools even farther in the wrong direction, if they fall prey to the impulse to “teach to the test.”

LePage’s grading system is based on math and reading test scores, as well as student improvement over time in those two subjects. For grades 3-8, it is also based on the collective growth in math and reading of the bottom 25 percent of students. Graduation rates are considered when grading high schools. The system also requires 90 percent student participation in state assessments, such as the SAT for high school juniors, and strongly incentivizes participation rates of 95 percent or better.

So schools that do not perform as well as others at standardized testing, or that do not have as high graduation rates, can expect to perform poorly on LePage’s new exam. Test scores and graduation rates have a high correlation with poverty, so it is likely that, in general, well-off communities will receive good grades while poorer areas will not.

That’s not much of a surprise, and it is unclear how the new designation will help the schools that do poorly. LePage has proposed a state office that will help funnel some $3 million to underperforming schools, “to help struggling schools by providing state-level guidance and clear objectives to administrators.”

But that time and money would be better spent identifying Maine schools that are creating well-rounded students in different environments, and seeing what they have to teach other schools. Finding out how one Maine school tackled a particular problem or created a certain atmosphere is much more valuable than repackaging the same old data into a new delivery system.

Ben Bragdon is the managing editor of Current Publishing. He can be reached at bbragdon@keepmecurrent.com or followed on Twitter.