Trust me: stop what you're doing and read this article that will run on the front page of tomorrow's LA Times. I have no doubt that it will be among the most important and influential education-related articles of the year.

This is breakthrough journalism: the Times obtained math and English "scores for the academic years 2002-03 through 2008-09 from LAUSD under the California Public Records Act. Included were 1.5 million scores from 603,500 students. Students' names were not included, but their teachers' names were." The Times then hired "a senior economist and education researcher at Rand Corp. to conduct a "value-added" analysis of the data" and is now publishing the data, including in the near future (I hope you're sitting down) "the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available." In other words, parents (and anyone else) will be able to see which teachers are most and least effective.

Once the most and least effective teachers were identified, the reporters were actually able to sit in on their classrooms, observe what was going on, and then get the teachers' reactions when they were shown the data about their effectiveness (or lack thereof).

I have never heard of anything like this.

Here's an excerpt from the article with a summary of the findings, which are in some ways not surprising (the overwhelming importance of teachers and the irrelevance of the years of experience or how many certificates they have, for example), but in other ways very much surprising to me ("the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas" – this is completely contrary to all other data I've seen):

• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year's end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.

• Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.

• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students' academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.

• Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers' effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students' performance.

Other studies of the district have found that students' race, wealth, English proficiency or previous achievement level played little role in whether their teacher was effective.

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GRADING THE TEACHERS