Choosing your preferred education policy this year comes down to how far you trust teachers.
In one corner of the election ring, National, the Māori Party and United Future believe that requiring schools to get their students up to national standards has forced teachers to put a lot more effort into those - mainly Māori and Pasifika - who were falling behind.
In the opposite corner, Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First all want to scrap national standards and restore what NZ First's Tracey Martin calls a "high-trust model" - giving teachers much more scope to follow the students' interests and let them learn at their own pace.
Gareth Morgan's Opportunities Party is somewhere in the middle, broadly keeping the current system but delaying national standards until Year 6 and postponing the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) until a student's final year in school.
And out on the edge of the ring, the free-market Act Party has its own high-trust model, placing its trust in competing entrepreneurs and community groups to offer students a wide choice of educational options to suit every interest and temperament.