Two weeks ago, several of my calleagues and I received an e-mail from an assistant principal at T.S. Williams in Alexandria, Va., asking us to stop by his office for a "Pre-Observation and Goal Setting Conference." When I started teaching 32 years ago, messages like that made me nervious: I worried that I would never measure up to my bosses' lofty expectations. Now I just feel sorry for the administrators who are asked to play these games with teachers.

For games they certainly are, though they're not much fun. When I went into the meeting, I told the administrator that my main goal was to get my students to write clearly and precisely. He told me that sort of objective was too hard to assess. He showed me instead the kind of "measurable" goal that the school system's central office has set: "to increase the SOL scores by two points, raising it to 79.65."

That phrase, which is ed-speak for improving the students' pass rate on Virginia's six-year-old standardized test (supposedly the benchmark of excellence in the commonwealth), was taken from the Alexandra school system's new bible, "Academic Goal Setting." Consultants from the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary was hired to create that tome, which porpounds much the same methodology that I found in a 1968 pamphlet titled "Instructional Systems." You could call it "teaching by numbers" - an approach that is fed by adminstrators' desire to turn the creative to and fro of the classroom into a quantifiable process that can be tallied on a spreadsheet. This school year, more than ever before, has remind me that administrators and teachers live in separate worlds - so much so that we might as well be in different profession.

In one sense, of course, we are in different professions. That's clear from my conversations with my colleagues at T.C. Williams, who I think are fairly representative of teachers and administrators in most school systems. "There's this enormous disconnect betwen the schools and the central office, whish is off in a separate building where they rarely see kids," explains Susan Kaput, head of T.C.'s math department. "The people there have no idea what we are facing, yet they don't hesitate to tell us what to do. I have kids in algebra functioning on a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Many of the don't have the prerequisite skills they need to succeed in algebra. But the central office doesn't want to hear about his. It's not good PR. So they have us do simplistic, nosensical things like write down "measurable objectives' and put an SOL for the day on the board, as if that is going to help us teach algebra and geometry to kids who come into the school so woefully unprepared."

School principals and their assistants are supposed to be principal teaches (the new jargon is "instructional leaders"). It's a nice concept and was probabley a reality in the small schools in England where it originated. But in American schools today, especially ones like T.C. Williams (with 2,200 students of every possible background and need), the job of an administrator lies somewhere between that of a cop and a social worker - controlling and comforting kids and, to a lesser degree, their parents. Administrators bounce from one crisis to another, from the time they greet kids coming off the buses in the morning until the time they leave (often at 11 p.m. aftr chaperoning a school event). It can be an exausting and often thankless job.

Administrators are crucial to the success of a school, but many people who began their careers in the classroom don't belong in the front office. The two jobs require different sets of skills - and different interests. "How can chasing down troubled-makers all day, calling their parents, hving to be 'yes mennn' to the latest whim of the latest superintendent and the school board, compare with the dynamics of the classroom?" asks Ed Cannon, an ex-Navy officer who is head of T.C."s English department.

To physics teacher Myron Hanke, who ran his own accounting firm for 12 years before changing professions, teaching is a vocation. "If what you are doing is a job, it is not a calling. Administrative jobs are for people who don't want to be in the classroom. They try to convince themselves that they are doing more good for kids than teachers are, but for many of them, especially those in the central office, the actions they perform every day do not even indirectly affect students."

Administrators, who typically have spent some portion of their career teaching, are just as baffled by teachers and their passion for the classroom. The ultimate penalty for failing as an administrator is to be "sent back to the classroom." Even banishment to a meaningless role in the corner of the central office while you await retirement is considered preferable.

Maybe I'm naive, but it seems to me that in most professions, promotions come only after you excel in a job. You really do go up a ladder. At law firms, only the top attorneys make partner. When I first moved to the Washington area, I couldn't find a teaching jjob, so I worked for a year for Xerox, where only the very best sales reps were promoted to managers and any one of them could teach the recruits all the tricks of selling.

In education, "moving up" is really more like moving out - stepping off one ladder and onto another one in order to clamber on you way. Although administrative jobs come with benefits such as better pay, many of the best and most passionate teachers don't consider an administrative post a promotion. I've seen good teachers and coaches who have gone into administration only to find they miss the interaction with students. Others simply didn't have the managerial and PR skills - or the patience - to be good administrators

Some conclude that the classroom is the most rewarding place to be. If there's any teacher I know who would be a good administrator, it's my colleague Gary Thomas, a West Point graduate and retired Army colonel who managed a $500-million budget and 750 people when he was in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers' New York district. Three years ago, he began teaching math at T.C. Williams with the idea of eventually becoming an administrator, perhaps a school superintendent. "I thought that would be the best way to have an impact on the largest possible number of kids," said Thomas.

Teaching soon put that idea out of his mind. Thomas found that the hierarchy of the military and that of schools isn't the same. "The culture in the Army is to aspire up," Thomas told me. "Your success in mahy respects is measured by whether you are still on the command track. In schools, I realized that teaching and being an administrator are two separate careers. I could never get the same satisfaction as a career administrator that I get teaching. I no longer see the classroom as steppingstone - it's where the action is, where I can have the biggest impact."

The way T.C. assistant principal Tammy Ignacio sees it, "People are born either teachers or administrators." She says that, for her, teaching was always the path to her true calling, of being an administrator. She seems to thrive on her hectic schedule, which in a single day can include breaking up a fight, going to court to testify against a kid she has found with drugs, straightening out parents who think their incorrigible kid is a saint, taking a girl home to change an outfit that is too risque and coming back to school in the evening for a basketball game.

(I published this article because it gives insight into the teacher and administrator role. I doubt if it has anything to do with mitigating the stress that is caused by a dogmatic administrator. And, it likely has little to do with reaching common educational goals. It does, however, provide insight and contributes to your understanding of these two conflicting roles. Hopefully, it will help you survive.)

As the comments from T.C. staff members indicate, we need to do much more to increase understanding between teachers and administrators if we're to provide reachable goals for every one of our students and their teachers, rather than measurable but meaningless standards for our schools.