With soaring costs and double-digit truancy, increasing illiteracy and steadily falling Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, many American high schools are clearly in trouble. This week's cover story examines the plight of U.S. secondary education today and profiles three high schools not burdened with the special, severe social problems of the inner cities.

The three: Medford High in a Bos ton suburb, Marshfield High in Coos Bay, Ore., and West High in Iowa City, Iowa.

The story was written by Education Editor Annalyn Swan and researched by Reporter-Researcher Ellie McGrath. Both are recent college graduates who found that their public school years did not prepare them well for what was to come. "I hadn't read enough classics and had never taken essay exams before I got to college," says Swan, who went from Biloxi High in Mississippi to Princeton. "My high school and those we visited for this story don't anticipate the challenges of the outside world; they seem to equate excellence with elitism." McGrath, a 1970 Gloucester (Mass.) graduate, concurs: "It was hard to forgive my high school for what I had to go through during freshman year at Mount Hoiyoke. And the schools of the '60s were considered good by today's standards."

For her story, Swan flew out to Coos Bay, where she sat in on classes and interviewed students along with Los Angeles Correspondent Edward Boyer, a former high school and college English and journalism teacher. Occasionally mistaken for a student s Swan found the teen-agers eager to talk. When she asked a class if three or four would like to join her for dinner, 13 newspaper staffers showed up. In Iowa City, Midwest Correspondent Anne Constable found that students and faculty at West High were so excited by the attention that they made TIME'S coverage the subject of a school-paper story. McGrath and Boston Correspondent Marlin Levin, who attended classes and talked to students and teachers at Medford High, experienced a similar reception. Says Levin: "Headmaster William McCormack opened the doors to us and said, 'Here it is, go where you want to go, write what you see. This, for better or for worse, is what we are.' "

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