In some of her most blunt public statements yet, outgoing Los Angeles school board President Caprice Young on Monday called the teachers union the greatest obstacle there is to improving the city's educational system.

Young is among two board incumbents who lost their re-election bids to union-backed candidates during the May election in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"The union exists for a really good reason, and that is the teachers got the wrong end of the stick for decades," she said. "But we now have created the beast we deserve for doing that."

Young was speaking Monday evening to members of Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, the group that lobbied for last year's unsuccessful San Fernando Valley cityhood vote.

She said the union's opposition to splitting up the LAUSD, opposition to charter schools and opposition to streamlining the district's bureaucracy is holding back critical reforms.

Young said the district has grown too large to manage itself and needs to be broken up into 10 to 15 smaller districts.

But with the union opposed to the notion, generating the political willpower to do that is close to impossible, she said.

"The bottom line is there are two things that create power in California -- that's money and votes -- and they have both," she said. "That's fine if you favor their policies, but their policies are not necessarily pro-kid."

Young said the only way she could think to advance the cause is for 10 to 15 simultaneous split-up movements -- one for each newly proposed district -- to take on the power structure and call for a ballot on each proposal.

That would force the union to split up its resources to fight multiple fronts, she said.

"If we do 10 or 15 of them all at once, there's a shot some of them will go through," she said. "It's going to take a movement to make all that happen and, as you know, movements are expensive."

Young, whose voting district lies in the west San Fernando Valley, has been criticized by her opponents, who say she's calling for a split-up only to pander to her constituents, including many who favored Valley secession from Los Angeles.