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“These parent representatives do travel to conferences,” he says. “They’ve been to New York. They’ve been to Phoenix. They take [the trips] at district expense, and when they travel, they are entitled to a per diem to cover travel and expenses on the road.”

By now, the parents on both sides resemble those computer-generated armies you see marching across the desert in big Hollywood productions like Troy or The Mummy, nameless figures that give an event some dramatic tension. In the end, they almost don’t need to speak. They’re just legislative wallpaper, human eye candy for the lawmakers, who frequently deny them the chance to speak anyway.

It might seem odd that the public is learning about the mayor’s school-reform spending habits months after his lobbying campaign. But it’s no accident. The mayor’s campaign committee discloses its spending habits every six months, making his donations and expenditures secret from the public for long stretches — and old news by the time he tells the world.

The same is true of Villaraigosa’s latest campaign apparatus, the Partnership for Better Schools, the committee that will soon dump huge piles of money into the campaigns of the mayor’s slate of school-board candidates. By filing the paperwork for his committee with the county, the mayor ensured that voters won’t know which well-connected developer gave him money until July 31 — months after the election is over.

Had Villaraigosa registered the Partnership for Better Schools with the city’s Ethics Commission, voters would learn the names of his contributors before they go to the polls on March 6. Now they won’t.

Even after months of delay, the mayor’s committee could not identify all of its expenditures on ACORN from last summer. Although the mayor spent $34,000 on buses that sent parents to Sacramento and his town-hall meetings, not every passenger belonged to ACORN, James says.

And not every parent who backed Villaraigosa’s school plan traveled on the mayor’s dime. The Los Angeles Parents Union, organized by the charter-school company Green Dot, dipped into its own money.

Green Dot founder Steve Barr said his group paid its own way because it did not want to feel beholden to Villaraigosa. “To take money from them means you’re not an independent voice anymore,” says Barr. “And they offered. They offered a lot.”