This report is the third in a series devoted specifically to compiling comprehensive and timely information about public school teachers. The material in the document reflects data gathered from a nationwide questionnaire survey of samples of teachers in both elementary and secondary schools. The object of this report is to provide an account of the status of the American teaching profession at the beginning of the 1970's as well as of the changes that have occurred during the 1960's. The report is organized in eight sections, the first four of which concern different aspects of the teachers' professional lives. Two more sections cover their personal, civic, and community lives. One of these sections deals specifically with the characteristics of teachers as individuals and members of families and their economic status, while the other of these two sections deals with teachers' relations with their communities and their activities as citizens. The concluding section gives a compilation of data from preceding sections in the form of selected profiles describing the elementary teacher, the secondary teacher, the man teacher, and the woman teacher. The appendixes include (1) a technical note on sampling variation and the interpretation of statistical data, (2) a reproduction of the questionnaire used in the survey, and (3) complete tabulations of responses to all questions in the order of their occurrence in the questionnaire. Tables accompanying the text are for the most part confined to reporting trend data and combining selected material from the last appendix with comparable data from 1961 and 1966. (Author)