| Increases in high school dropout rates, declines in college preparatory enrollment, and reports that students are dissatisfied with school, prompted exploration at efficiently producing teaching that interests students.;This study's sample contains 60 teacher aggregates of 3,961 student questionnaires gathered over two years from the same high school. Factor analysis of 52 variables revealed "student-caring" versus "task-driven," as key teaching dimensions that persist across fourteen cited management and psychology studies. The resulting "managerial grid for teachers" offered graphic perspectives of interrelationships not afforded by conventional frameworks.;Allocative efficiency was probed with planar, quadratic, Cobb-Douglas, probit and logit models of educational production functions fitted to proxies for student satisfaction and the two grid dimensions. Though the curved surface of the quadratic explained the most and reflected textbook-like diminishing returns, the planar model explained much, and was simpler.;Unequal numerators and denominators for the marginal-product-to-marginal-price ratios implied allocative inefficiency. Student-caring more strongly influences satisfaction than does task-driven but teachers are implicitly paid less for caring than for task-driven. Moreover, teacher's salary is explicitly driven most by experience, and relatively less by education--neither of which much affect satisfaction.;Citations show ten advantages that student evaluations of teaching (SETs) offer in complementing achievement measures. And reanalysis of the Dr. Fox studies of SETs shows teacher's enthusiasm to consistently account for over twice the achievement that lecture content does.;The data suggest that more student-caring should produce higher percentages of satisfied students. Changes are suggested involving teacher-training institutions, hiring, career ladders, in-service enrichment program, teacher pay, and adding SETs to California's statewide program for gathering achievement data.;Future research is urged that uses the managerial grid to: (1) analyze more comprehensive models involving interaction of achievement, satisfaction, teaching styles and other key schooling variables; (2) establish quantitatively, the output consequences of teaching style trade-offs; and, (3) articulate preferred teaching styles.;Above all, the grid should help define and achieve teaching styles that better mix student-caring/task-driven inputs, and satisfaction/achievement outputs--to aid the bigger picture of long-term student wellbeing and reversal of trends that prompted this study. |
