EDITORIAL WHAT PRICE REFORM? AT LEAST A MILLION, AS IT TURNS OUT.

SO far the cost fighting off reform at Los Angeles Unified School District has been more than $350,000 in public money. That paid for lobbyists, for consulting, for school officials and parents to travel to Sacramento and for T-shirts for supporters, among other things.

That may seem like a lot of money to us regular folk, but it's chump change compared with what the school board will spend on its legal challenge to the recently passed school-reform legislation.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, too, has dropped about $11,000 of taxpayer dollars on this campaign for mayoral-led reform of L.A.'s schools. The bulk of his financing, however, came from a campaign that raised more than $1 million. No doubt he will be forced to use all that and more by the time the LAUSD lawsuit is settled.

There's nothing unusual about the amounts spent by both sides to fight this political battle. That's just part of the cost of any sort of real political change. And that's what makes it so distressing.