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Working for Albuquerque Public Schools, you get used to the typical public reaction to any mention of the district: harsh laughter, derisive smirks, rolling eyes and shaking heads. Toiling for APS often feels like being a bit player on a last-place baseball team. You're ashamed of the uniform and just about powerless to do anything about the losing.

APS is known for many things, almost all of them bad. Low test scores, high dropout rates, ineffective top-heavy management - and now police department shenanigans.

At the same time, there are wonderful things going on in APS classrooms. Stellar teachers and school administrators are working with tremendous kids and accomplishing amazing feats. The professional secret for many APS careerists has been to ignore the district and focus solely on what goes on inside their own classrooms and schools. Any thought devoted to the larger bureaucracy is simply an invitation to career insanity.

But on occasion, the insanity lets itself in uninvited.

News came out last week of an APS principal shuffle, involving about 20 institutions. The reason given for the moves centered around the idea of taking the district's "best people" and moving them into "challenging positions" - quotations taken from the district's release on the subject.

On one level, the idea makes a bit of sense. Good principals made their schools better and, now, with their existing schools in better shape, they can spread the quality work to schools in sorry shape.

But, like most of the district's ideas, problems crop up when one does some thinking.

Starting most simply, and using the plan's logic: Won't moving good principals lead to a decline in the schools they move from? And what about instances in which schools simply trade principals, like Hayes and Taft middle schools? In that scenario, who is the "best people" principal, and who isn't? Which student body is getting the "bad" principal? Taft or Hayes?

What about negative impacts from the shuffling itself? If there is anything APS needs, it's stability in places already successful, especially as there are apparently so few of them. On top of that, the district is having a devil of a time finding high-quality people willing to remain school principals. Administrators' pay hasn't kept up with teacher-pay increases, and stories of principals going back to the classroom to earn nearly equivalent money are rampant.

So what better way to reward good principals than by moving them to "challenging positions," whether they want to or not?

That gets us to my little nook of the district - Jefferson Middle School. For reasons unclear, our school didn't make the published list - but, surely enough, our principal is being forced to go elsewhere.

I won't go into more detail, because school staffers received no more details. We only know our esteemed principal is out, our community is largely uninformed because we didn't make the publicized list, and another school has suffered an intrusion by the district.

We are merely left shaking our heads, rolling our eyes and feeling like a Kansas City Royal, sitting uselessly at the far end of our perennially losing team's bench.

Key is an Albuquerque writer and middle school teacher. Visit his blog at frannyzoo.blogspot.com