EDITORIAL SAVING THE LAUSD VILLARAIGOSA CHALLENGES DISTRICT BY MAKING HIS BEST CASE FOR REAL REFORM.

In last night's State of the City speech, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa finally offered some details of his plan to reform Los Angeles public schools, setting the stage for a showdown with the failed education establishment.

And while he is no longer touting it as "mayoral control," his plan looks an awful lot like mayoral control.

He wants to strip the school board of most of its power and create a council of mayors - with him as the controlling partner at the top - which would appoint an education czar and hold him or her accountable.

Still, the setup is fundamentally different from Villaraigosa's initial idea of having the mayor of Los Angeles appoint the school board. He scrapped that plan because it almost certainly was illegal for the mayor of L.A. to trample on the interests of all the smaller cities that make up the LAUSD without them having a say in how their schools are run.

That's how the vision of a council of mayors, which gives a voice to the other cities served by the LAUSD, came into being.

Cocky and charismatic, Villaraigosa is certain he can gain the other mayors' backing for his plan for state legislation to give a single person authority to streamline the LAUSD's bloated and ineffective bureaucracy, hold administrators and teachers accountable, and empower parents and communities to play an important role in school reform.

There's a better way - breaking up the nation's second-largest school district into manageable pieces - but Villaraigosa has shunned that approach.

The truth is that breakup of the district will never go anywhere until this mayoral-control debate is played out. The fact that he's pushing debate forward gives the district its best chance at survival.

The supporters of the district - the administration, the school board and the teachers union - have offered nothing substantial to counter Villaraigosa's challenge. The mayor proposes reform, and they respond with the status quo dressed up with the language of reform but without substance.

Indeed, they have offered nothing except symbolic reform in the past 25 years, despite the overwhelming desire by the public for better schools. This is evident in the fact that voters have voted four times for better schools, coughing up $19 billion in local and state tax dollars to rebuild LAUSD schools.

What voters expect is not just pretty buildings. They want state-of-the-art education and an effective curriculum. They want to see excellence in the classrooms, not just in the building process. And they want it soon, not in incremental reforms that may or may not come to fruition by the time the just-born generation finally gets to high school.

The public wants a change in the culture of the LAUSD, to see teachers and principals energized and creative, rewarded for success and held accountable for failure.

Villaraigosa might not have all the answers, and he's going to have a tough time selling his plan. But he's put the first genuine pieces of reform on the table and moved the debate forward.