EDITORIAL UNION MADE SCHOOL BOARD PUTS SPECIAL INTERESTS ABOVE NEEDS OF STUDENTS, PARENTS AND TEACHERS.

FOR all the hype about minidistricts, the war between United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer isn't about bureaucracy. It's about power.

For 25 years, the UTLA ran the Los Angeles Unified School District - straight into the ground. Despite a swelling student population, the union-controlled board built no schools. It fought accountability, and watched as the academic reputation of a once-proud school district crumbled. Eventually, public disgust (aided by piles of former Mayor Richard Riordan's campaign cash) caught up with the school board. Reformers took over, and named Romer as superintendent.

And though Romer has made some mistakes, there can be no quibbling about his overall achievements. He's won over public support for $10 billion worth of bond measures, launching a massive school-construction program that is actually delivering on its promises. He's extended teacher training and oversight, and presided over a steady improvement in test scores.

But now the UTLA is back in power, and the union wants to show Romer who's boss - or more likely chase him out of town.

The situation now is looking worse than ever. UTLA-backed school board members are taking orders from their union overlords - sometimes in the form of hand signals at board meetings - working to make their special-interest agenda the law of the land.

So teacher accountability is under assault. So is Romer's minidistrict system, and - as usual - the UTLA is looking to siphon yet more public money away for its members.

The union makes a fair point when criticizing Romer for his failure to aggressively scale back the LAUSD bureaucracy, of which minidistricts have regrettably become one more useless layer. Yet there's a certain irony to this complaint - the district's bureaucracy never grew faster, bigger or more onerous than the previous time the UTLA was in control.

Moreover, the union's real motivations become all too clear in how it proposes to spend the money it seeks to save from slashing the bureaucracy. The wish list notably includes increased benefits for its members, when the district has far greater needs, including further teacher training.

The UTLA also seeks to scale back programs used to create some semblance of teacher accountability - putting the interests of the hacks within its ranks over those of the professionals, to say nothing of parents and students.

Through it all, union-backed board members stand to drive Romer, who has one year left on his contract, out of town. If that happens, they will be free to replace him with one of their own.

And we all know how that turned out last time.