EDITORIAL STACKING THE BOARD TEACHERS UNION HOPES TO GET TOTAL CONTROL OVER LAUSD BY ANOINTING THE PRESIDENT.

IF and when he is elected president of the Los Angeles school board, Jose Huizar will face the most important question of his brief public service career:

Will he serve the parents, the classroom teachers, the students and the taxpayers of the Los Angeles Unified School District, or will he represent the narrow interest of the teachers' union?

The union is betting on the latter.

By virtue of defeating outgoing president Caprice Young and former president Genethia Hudley-Hayes, United Teachers Los Angeles effectively owns four of seven seats on the board that will take office on July 1.

With that kind of clout, the UTLA can choose whatever president it wants, and insiders - including Huizar himself - say it's Huizar.

It's an interesting selection, seeing that, unlike the four board members whose campaigns depended so heavily on union funding, Huizar also has the support of former Mayor Richard Riordan's Coalition for Kids. That should make him, in theory anyway, more independent than fellow union-backed board members David Tokofsky, Jon Lauritzen, Marguerite LaMotte and Julie Korenstein.

But Tokofsky has never taken orders from anybody, and newcomers Lauritzen and LaMotte are too green for leadership. Korenstein should be the union's obvious choice for president, but clearly the UTLA thinks it can do even better by pulling off the seduction of Huizar.

By engineering Huizar's presidency, union officials seem to think they can buy his loyalty, thereby upping their influence from four members to a solid five.

Let's hope they're wrong.

It was a union-run board that spent a quarter-century driving the district into the ground, launched the Belmont Learning Center catastrophe and brought a once-high-achieving school district to its knees.

It was union pressure that convinced state officials to quash efforts to break up the LAUSD into three smaller and more manageable districts. And it's the union that doggedly fights charter schools, the best hope for education reform around.

Huizar has shown streaks of independence in the past. He's bucked the union in support of a longer school year, and has, on occasion, been a rare voice for fiscal restraint within the district.

On the other hand, he was also key in resurrecting Belmont recently. But Belmont sits in his district, and it's understandable, albeit short-sighted, for Huizar to want a new high school for his underserved constituents as quickly as possible.

It's hard to predict how a Huizar-led school board would act, be it as an independent force for reform, or as a tool of the special interests.

It's doubtful the ULTA would back him unless it were confident that Huizar would do its bidding.

But he still could defy the union's political calculations and lead the fight for real reform that benefits children, their parents and the vast majority of teachers who take pride in their work.

The choice is his.