People are always telling Frank Murphy that he reminds them of the principal in Boston Public. He's not sure why. He certainly doesn't look much like him. (For one thing, Murphy's white and Chi McBride, who plays the TV principal, is black.) At Boston Public's Winslow High, the principal has to tough out what seems an inordinate number of hostage crises. At Murphy's Meade Elementary in North Philadelphia, the mayhem is mostly limited to excess noise during indoor recess. And while Murphy's got his gruff side, he's an eminently good-humored guy, more inclined to delegation and negotiation than shouting matches.

Still, it's telling, this comparison between a real-life big-city principal and a TV character. Because I'd wager that for many Americans -- except those who know urban schools from personal experience -- TV and movies and alarming newspaper headlines are the only source of information about our cities' public school system.

And the headlines have been alarming of late. The national press has descended on the Philadelphia story en masse to see how the nation's largest experiment in privatization, Edison et al., is working. And most of the time, as in this week's New York Times story about a star suburban principal resigning her Philly post in despair, the news is bad: Philly's school system is out of control and beyond hope.

So perhaps I can be forgiven for expecting, when I took part in Philadelphia Cares' Principal for a Day program a few weeks ago, to find neither control nor hope. And for being surprised to find both.

Meade is not one of the schools that's been taken over by Edison or had its faculty and staff "reconstituted"; it's not "failing" at the moment, to use the familiarly punishing term. That status may change. While test scores for grades K-4 have slowly gone up during Murphy's tenure (he came to the school in 1997), the recent expansion of the school to K-6 means that the fifth and sixth graders won't have benefited from the programs that have now been instituted in earlier grades. Yet the entire school will be judged by the fifth graders' scores on Pa. System of School Assessment tests, which at the moment is given to only fifth and eighth graders.

I don't know from scores, except to suspect that the current obsession with them has little to do with education and everything to do with politics. But, having been an elementary school teacher myself a long, long time ago, I do know a little about what learning looks like. And in every Meade classroom I visited, I saw learning taking place. Kids listening avidly to stories, not just for entertainment but for comprehension. Kids learning to read in small groups. Kids making latkes and waiting patiently for their turn to eat what they'd made. Artwork everywhere -- including murals made in collaboration with the Clay Studio. Books everywhere -- including some left out on a lending rack (to which they are almost always returned) and some in the sanctuary of the library, where kids who read a certain amount a year get the chance to pick out books as prizes.

Books figured, too, in the assembly. As guest principal for a day, I got to read a book of Principal Murphy's choosing to the older grades. Goin' Someplace Special recalls an era of racial segregation in which a little African-American girl ventures out alone for the first time to the one place she feels welcome: the public library. Murphy used the story to make a point about character and choices: how you could choose to be a hero, like Rosa Parks or the girl in the book, or you could choose to be "nasty" -- like the people who supported segregation, or, more immediately, like the students who had earlier in the assembly mocked a dance performance by a group of sixth-grade boys. It was a respectful lecture about showing respect, offering students the choice to be better people without condescending to them -- an approach (embodied, too, in those books left free for the borrowing) that pervades the school.

I talked to Frank Murphy about that attitude a week later, at a breakfast gathering of other Philadelphians who had volunteered to be Principals for a Day. He says if you treat a school like a hellhole, a prison, kids will view it as such, too. But in his school he believes "the kids like the art on the walls, they like things to be nice, they like reading, they like writing -- and therefore, for them, school is a likable place."

Simple lesson, really: If you treat the students with respect, respect is what you get back. If you treat them as test-takers and stuff them into inadequate facilities, a failing school is what you get back.

I learned a lot from temporary principaldom. And I plan to return to Meade. If every citizen had the chance to leave preconceptions behind and get an inside view of the beleaguered Philly school system, maybe we'd all gain a little more respect for the possibilities and the problems faced by principals like Murphy -- and his students and staff -- every day.