Public Education Quality

Can anyone tell me why? I mean, literally everything that is ever done in the education space is rejected and hated and railed against by the union. So have the education unions ever think about it, have they ever not asked for more money, more resources, more non-contact time, while at the same time telling you everything in the classroom is crap. So the NCEA changes confirmed over the weekend into these new certificates. To most parents' eyes are going to make perfect sense, of course. Anyone who's had kids through these past few years, these past few calamitous years knows full well the old NCEA has been an abject failure. The indisputable outworkings are one, we have a swathe of kids leaving school too early without any real qualifications to their name. We then wonder why their unemployment rate's so high. And two, those who do leave, too many have a potpourri of random eclectic passes that may or may not mean anything in the real world. On paper, I suppose having hundreds of choices and vague terms like merit or achieved probably looked like it made sense, but it relied on parents and kids having the wherewithal and interest to navigate their way through a system that in reality allowed you to take basically at large you'd take the piss for an easy pass. A to E. You know where you're at. Being able to actually read and write remains as important today as it ever was, and a few basics like science and maths are critical for life as well as job prospects. But no, no, we hear this won't suit the students according to the unions. Is it is it the students that are worried? Or are they worried about themselves? See, the more accountable you make the system, the more questions that get asked about the quality of the teaching and what's unfolding in the classrooms. Unions hate that. All that accountability is deeply unsettling, and of course, only ever cured by wanting more money. Between the old NCEA and COVID, there is a generation of our kids in this country that have been robbed and quite possibly detrimentally affected for life. They have been let down shockingly. If the unions want to make up for any of that, some enthusiasm and a vastly more productive approach to change and improvement would go a long way to restoring their increasingly tattered reputations.