Earlier this week, officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District found themselves in a pickle.

On the one hand, they faced having to fire some 900 uncredentialed teachers to be in compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act. On the other, school was starting soon, and the district couldn't afford to be hundreds of teachers short.

School districts across California faced the same predicament, thanks to a state bureaucracy that's more interested in shirking standards than in living up to them, and unions that are more concerned with protecting their least competent members than in educating California's neediest children.

Under the law, all Title I (high poverty) schools must have "highly qualified teachers" by the start of the school year. For California schools, that means the teachers must know their subject matter and have a credential, or at least be actively working toward getting one.

This shouldn't be a problem. The No Child Left Behind Act has been on the books for the better part of two years, giving the state and local school districts plenty of time to get into compliance. But for an education establishment that reflexively resists reform, all the time in the world wouldn't be time enough.

Belatedly, the California Commission on Credentialing decided on Aug. 15 to phase out emergency permits and waivers given to uncredentialed teachers who aren't in a credentialing program.

Fast forward two weeks, with the school year about to begin and many a teacher's permit about to expire, and the school districts were in a panic, terrified by the prospect of classrooms full of students with no one to teach them.

With thousands of kids at risk, the commission gave in and extended the emergency permits of uncredentialed teachers across the state.

Whether the state education establishment deliberately engineered this crisis or merely dropped the ball is anybody's guess. But it seems all too convenient that its failure to plan has effectively derailed reform.

Of course, there's a better way to address the crisis, without relaxing standards, but it's one that education unions would never tolerate: Allowing the district to reassign its teachers from school to school, perhaps with "combat pay" for working in less desirable conditions.

If the LAUSD could simply move "highly qualified" teachers to the schools that need them, while sending the uncredentialed to campuses where they would get more support and better-prepared students, it could quickly come into compliance with federal law and bring more equity to public education.

But United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents LAUSD teachers, long ago won the right to keep teachers in one school, and it opposes any measure that even resembles merit-based pay.

So the LAUSD found itself in its pickle, caught between the law and the start of the academic year. In its wisdom, the state decided that students at the district's neediest schools were better off starting the school year with underqualified teachers than with no teachers at all.

That's probably true, but it's a lousy choice.