“Listen, because of my job, I can say things about education in public forums,” Summers says. “What is the one thing that you want people to know about Boston Public Schools?”

It’s not just about the schools, the teachers respond, stressing the impact of students’ backgrounds and level of parental support on dealing with education problems.

Summers also visited a special-education class for autistic children, taught a third-grade class about literacy using word puzzles and engaged a fifth-grade class in a discussion about graphs as a tool for analyzing data—expanding his fan base throughout the day.

One student was so enthusiastic after Summers showed his fifth-grade class how to plot the relationship between two variables—grades and number of days absent, growth of a plant and amount of sunlight and height and weight—that the student pulled Summers by the arm over to the blackboard and showed him a “tree graph.”

Summers was one of 55 Boston-area leaders who spent the morning in various Boston schools in yesterday’s Principal For A Day program.

“The Boston schools have a terrible reputation. We wanted to get as many people as possible to see them, and to see what the principal’s job is like,” explains Ellen Guiney, executive director of Boston Plan for Excellence, the organization which sponsored the program. “We wanted to dispel the myth that it is chaos, that nobody knows what they are doing.”

At the end of his day on the other side of the River, Summers says it was well worth the time away from Mass. Hall.

“Everyone in a position of leadership should spend some time in a public school,” Summers says. “It will change their outlook.”

And it will wear them out.

“Doing this everyday, with this many kids,” Summers says, gesturing to a buzzing classroom full of children, “is a lot, a lot harder than my day job.”

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.