You are as correct blaming the fire alarm for the fire as blaming the Rochester teachers and the elementary, middle, and high schools for the poor performance of so many of their enrolled students.

The schools are where many of these students first meet the expectations of the larger society and learn how they differ from the expectations of family, friends, and neighbors. Performance in school needs a willingness to join this larger society, a willingness absent in too many Rochester students.

The teachers and schools have curricular goals, often mandated, and they do their best to help willing students to achieve these goals. The ongoing conversation in Rochester to the contrary, the development of the character and outlook of their students, while important, is secondary to the role of the schools. Achievement of these secondary goals is impossible if the students are unwilling to change.

Many students have utterly unrealistic expectations for their future. A New York City friend works with a small group of teenagers to expose them to good parts of the world they haven't seen. He told me that he took them to a restaurant to meet a chef. The chef invited the teen-agers to ask questions. One asked how much she earned, and she responded with $139,000 a year. The reaction of the teen-agers was that this was a disappointingly small income.

How do we deal with a very real problem that in many cases has persisted over several generations? I have no answer. The issue is not poverty, or at least, not primarily poverty. America's story, past and present, is filled with the successes of children of immigrants who spoke little English and were impoverished. What the immigrants communicated to their children (and I was one of them) were their aspirations and that school was the route to success for the next generation.�

The schools have a government-mandated, full-time task teaching. Systemic unwillingness to learn either needs to be addressed by some supplementary structure, whose cost is unlikely to be borne by today's voters, or addressed by those many parents who have been unable or unwilling to assume this role. Taking out our frustrations on the teachers and the schools can only make them less effective and says little good about ourselves.

The likely outcome is yet another generation of uneducated young people with very limited prospects for employment in the merciless global economy.

T.L. FINE, PITTSFORD