Two other teachers with doctorates left Pacific Collegiate this year at least in part because of the credentialing requirement, Mr. Goldenkranz said. (One of the departed teachers, Barbara Allen Logan, said she left largely out of concern that the school was not diverse enough.) Nine other faculty members who already hold doctoral degrees or are working toward them are taking the teacher-certification classes, stealing time away from their own students at Pacific Collegiate.

TO call this situation perverse, to ascribe it to the principle of unintended consequences, is to be, if anything, too reasonable. With the quality of teacher training being widely assailed as undemanding, most recently in a report last month by the Education Schools Project, a nonpartisan group, Pacific Collegiate in 2005 had what certainly looked like the solution. Out of a faculty of 29, 12 already had or were nearing doctoral degrees, primarily related to the subjects they taught.

And if the performance of the school mattered for anything, which unfortunately it does not in the credentialing issue, then Pacific Collegiate could show results. Admitting its 400 students in Grades 7 through 12 by lottery rather than by admissions exam, it recorded an average of 1,982 out of a possible 2,400 on the three-part SAT and sent graduates to Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Swarthmore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other elite universities.

Yet when Mr. Goldenkranz became principal in September 2005, he was informed by the Santa Cruz County Office of Education that, as he recalled in a recent interview, “in no uncertain terms, we had to develop a path to compliance with N.C.L.B.” Once the teachers were certified, Pacific Collegiate itself would have to pay $6,000 per teacher to the state for their enrollment in a program devised to improve retention of new faculty members.

Image Credit... David Suter

Mr. Goldenkranz had Pacific Collegiate’s lawyers poke for any loopholes. The word came back from the county. If Pacific Collegiate failed to have every one of its supposedly unqualified teachers enrolled in a certification program within two years, it would risk losing its charter to operate or its stream of public financing.