To collect the research for this week's cover story on the troubled lot of America's teachers, TIME correspondents fanned out across the country to interview interview educators, sit in classrooms and personally observe their subjects at work. New York Correspondent Dorothy Ferenbaugh found one dedicated teacher who inspires her pupils to respect not only learning but also cleanliness; she personally keeps her classroom spotless. Miami Bureau Chief Richard Woodbury suffered through sweltering days in a windowless classroom in Clearwater, Fla., with a high school teacher and his restless, apathetic students. As the teacher told Woodbury, "Now you can see why some days I ask, 'What am I beating my head against the wall for?' ''

Many of the correspondents had seen the teaching crisis through the eyes of their own children in public schools. But in addition, a large number of TIME staff members involved in the story had themselves experienced the rewards and perils of teaching. Boston Correspondent Joelle Attinger once tutored at an inner-city grade school in Philadelphia. Linda Stern Rubin of TIME's Detroit bureau teaches a class in magazine writing at Wayne State University. Los Angeles Correspondent Robert Goldstein taught for two years in a South Bronx grade school and suffered a literal case of "teacher burn-out." Returning from lunch one day, he found flames leaping from his classroom window.

Senior Editor Timothy Foote, who edited the story, taught a writing course at Yale University and English and French at a St. Louis prep school. Education Reporter-Researcher Jeanne-Marie North taught English in Medellin, Colombia, and Spanish at a small college in Illinois. Education Writer Kenneth Pierce was a lecturer in humanities at the University of Chicago for three years. "In those days I was torn between teaching and journalism," he says. "I would expound on Aristotle's Poetics in the morning and interview vice-squad detectives as a LIFE reporter in the afternoon." Civia Tamarkin of TIME'S Midwest bureau was a high school English teacher for two years in Benton Harbor, Mich. Indeed, the story itself was first suggested by Tamarkin, who was frustrated at the poor instruction her daughter Elisa, now nine, was receiving in Chicago's public schools. "Her papers came home filled with the teacher's flagrant errors," she says. "How do you tell your child that contrary to what the teacher says, pin and pen are not homonyms?"

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