Since the early 1980"s, the issue of America"s faltering public school system has become a serious concern. The crisis in K-12 education is one of the biggest challenges facing the nation. Should there be set standardized tests given to students, and furthermore, should the United States adopt a national curriculum to keep up with the standards of other countries? Lynn Davey and Monty Neill suggest in their essay entitled, "The Case against a National Test" that, "U.S. policymakers and the public have been deluged with proposals for national testing", because the failure of the nation to adequately educate the students of America has an endless list of negative effects. The pathetically low results of American students through international test scores in the United States suggests that with the lack of proper education, generations of children are growing up without the basic, essential knowledge needed to be able to compete in the workplace. Lynn Davey also states, "But because the United States has no national system of achievement testing, we cannot validly compare students" performance across the nation", in her essay entitled "The Case for a National Test". Albert Shanker, who was president of the American Federation of Teachers claims in his essay entitled, "Are American Schools Too Easy?" that, "In countries where there is a national curriculum, fewer students are lost, and fewer teachers are lost because they know what the students who walk into their classroom have already studied"(122). This is a good point, but in the United States students and teachers are allowed to express their ideas creatively. Not all teachers in the U.S. teach in the same manner, and for this reason it would be hard to establish a national curriculum in which all teachers taught the same things at the same time. In his essay entitled, "The Tyranny of a National Curriculum" Marc Bernstein suggests that, "People that support a national testing program believe that too many students are failing to perform to their potential and that drastic steps need to be taken to improve their education".