As a student, parent, and teacher observer-participant of the Rochester school district since 1948, I must respectfully offer a dissent to Mary Anna Towler's comments relative to the Brown decision of 1954 ("Education After Brown," July 18). Coincidentally, that year saw the City School District as a model of urban education, with each of its nine city high schools, plus the Paul Revere "trade school," offering a quality education to those willing to participate. Education at that time was not viewed as something that was "given."

When the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court, he was seeking to end the fiscal and other inequities which existed between black and white schools within the same district. Separate de jure educational facilities were, in the majority opinion, inherently unequal. No one in their right mind could argue otherwise.

Using that as our basis, we on the left then sought to apply this to the de facto segregation that existed in the North. We derided the opponents of busing, be they in South Boston, the Tenth Ward, or Charlotte, as racists.

Those pontificating on the matter and telling the hoi polloi what to do, such as Ted Kennedy and Judge Garrity, in his leafy Boston suburb, were insulated from the effects of their edicts. As a result, many of us with means, myself included, simply opted for private suburban secondary schools for our children once they graduated from the neighborhood primary school. Others opted for the, in effect, segregated MAP program.

The net result of our liberal attempt at social engineering has been to hasten the flight to the suburbs and destroy a primary reason for living in the city: being able to walk to the neighborhood elementary and secondary school. A largely working-class and middle-class district has been transformed, despite spending nearly $20,000 per pupil (dividing the total CSD budget by the number of students). We on the left bear responsibility for hastening that diaspora.

The "lack of community commitment to change," while no doubt "inexcusable," is easily explained: people in the burbs are not stupid. They are reluctant to see a repetition, in their communities, of what happened in the city.

Ivan Lennon, Beresford Road, Rochester