A representative of the Alabama Education Association used a Mobile County school board meeting to voice frustration over a new testing requirement he says has piled work onto local teachers. Jesse McDaniel, who represents Mobile teachers for the AEA, told board members on March 24 that more than 10 educators had contacted him with complaints about the extra labor involved in writing End-of-Quarter Tests, or EQTs, for the district’s 54 elementary schools. Under the change, each school develops its own EQT rather than relying on tests produced by the central office or academic affairs, shifting the burden of test construction from district specialists to individual classroom teachers.
“There’s been no expression of what the value of this is to measuring the district as a whole,” McDaniel said, arguing it was unclear how school-by-school tests improve systemwide assessment. The complaint struck at the heart of the district’s rationale for the change: if every school writes its own quarterly exam, the tests may fit local instruction more closely, but they no longer provide the apples-to-apples comparison that a common districtwide assessment delivers.
Superintendent Martha Peek said the shift grew out of a move to align the tests with the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards, the state’s version of the Common Core academic standards. Some principals and teachers, she said, asked for the latitude to build their own assessments, and the district granted it. The disagreement between the teachers’ organization and the administration turned a routine board meeting into a public airing of a question that has followed the standards movement across Alabama: who should decide how students are measured, and at what cost to the people in the classroom.
The New Testing Requirement and How It Works
End-of-Quarter Tests are exactly what the name implies — examinations administered at the close of each nine-week grading period to measure what students have learned. For years, districts commonly produced these tests centrally, with academic affairs staff writing a single version for every school at a given grade level. The centralized model meant a small number of test writers could cover the entire district, and it guaranteed that results were comparable from one school to the next.
Under the new arrangement adopted in Mobile County, that model was turned on its head for the district’s 54 elementary schools. Each school now develops its own EQT, written by its own teachers, rather than administering an exam produced by the central office. The approach gives schools flexibility to match their tests to the pacing and emphasis of their own instruction, which its supporters argue is a more honest measure of what was actually taught in that building that quarter.
The costs fall on teachers, who must translate the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards into test items, assemble the exams, and make sure they are fair and complete — work that used to be someone else’s job and now lands on top of lesson planning, grading and instruction. McDaniel’s message to the board was that the district had imposed that workload without explaining what it buys. The AEA, the state’s largest professional organization for public school employees, has long positioned itself as the watchdog for teacher workload, and the EQT change gave it a concrete grievance to bring to the dais.
Uneven Early Results Under the New Standards
The timing of the change mattered because the district’s early experience with the new standards was rocky. The first-quarter scores under the aligned assessments were so poor — steep drops in both math and language arts — that they were eventually discarded. The wipeout underscored how disruptive the transition to the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards, known nationally as Common Core, has been for districts across the state: material moves to different grade levels, rigor increases, and the first round of measurements tends to reflect the adjustment period rather than the students’ ultimate ability.
Alabama formally adopted the College and Career Ready Standards after they were introduced nationally, joining the wave of states that reworked their English and math expectations around the Common Core framework. The standards demand more of students at every grade level, particularly in mathematics, where concepts arrive earlier and in greater depth than under the previous Alabama courses of study. Districts like Mobile County, the largest school system in the state, felt the transition acutely because of the sheer scale of their classrooms and testing programs.
Against that backdrop, the decision to also hand EQT construction to individual schools compounded the challenge. Teachers were simultaneously learning new standards, teaching to them for the first time, and now writing their own assessments against them. When the first-quarter scores came back with steep drops in math and language arts, the district discarded them — an admission that the first measurement of the new alignment was too flawed to use, and a sign of how much trial and error the transition would involve for everyone from the central office to the classroom.
Two Views From the Same Board Room
Chief Academic Officer Karen Mohr said the work of writing the tests was assigned to teachers in an effort to reduce stress, since teachers best understand the standards their students must meet. The argument inverts the usual complaint: rather than adding burden, district leadership saw putting assessment in teachers’ hands as a way to keep them in control of the material they are accountable for teaching. A teacher who writes the test, the reasoning goes, knows exactly what it measures and has taught toward it all quarter.
McDaniel countered that whatever the intent, the reality on the ground was uncompensated labor. No extra planning days were granted, he said, and many teachers were preparing the tests on nights and weekends — hours carved out of family time to do work the central office once performed during the school day. The AEA’s position was that a mandate of this scale, touching 54 elementary schools across Alabama’s largest district, deserved either dedicated time or district resources, not an unfunded shift onto teachers’ personal schedules.
Superintendent Peek characterized the reaction as mixed, saying most teachers and principals had welcomed the chance to study the standards more closely. That framing acknowledged what Mohr and the administration had argued all along — that building assessments deepens teachers’ familiarity with the College and Career Ready Standards — while implicitly conceding that not everyone shared that view. The divide McDaniel described and the enthusiasm Peek described were both real, split across a workforce of thousands with varying workloads, grade levels and comfort with the new standards.
What Is at Stake for the District
Beneath the dispute over workload lies a bigger question about how a district measures itself. When every school writes its own quarterly test, a school’s results cannot be directly compared to those of the school across town, and the district loses a common yardstick for identifying which schools need support and which strategies are working. McDaniel’s pointed question — what is the value of this to measuring the district as a whole — framed the change as potentially sacrificing the district’s own visibility for a flexibility whose benefits had never been spelled out.
The administration’s answer rests on classroom-level quality: a test written by the teachers who delivered the instruction will match that instruction, making the results more meaningful inside the school’s own walls even if they are harder to compare across the system. Both positions have merit, and the debate in Mobile County reflected a tension playing out in districts nationwide as the Common Core era pushed assessment decisions closer to the classroom.
There were also practical stakes for the calendar. Third-quarter EQTs were completed in late March, meaning the school-by-school model had now been in place for three full quarters, with the first quarter’s scores discarded entirely. Every additional quarter without extra planning time extended the nights-and-weekends workload McDaniel described, and every quarter of school-written tests moved the district further from comparable systemwide data.
Where the Conversation Goes From Here
The March 24 exchange did not resolve the disagreement, but it put the issue on the record in front of the board that oversees the district. The AEA’s role in raising it is a familiar one in Alabama public education: the association regularly surfaces member complaints at board meetings, from pay and benefits to working conditions, and the EQT workload dispute fits squarely in that tradition. Board members now know that at least some of their elementary teachers are building quarterly exams on their own time, and that their superintendent attributes the change to requests from principals and teachers themselves.
For teachers across the district’s 54 elementary schools, the immediate picture was unchanged after the meeting: the third-quarter tests were done, the fourth quarter was ahead, and the standards the tests measure were not going anywhere. The Alabama College and Career Ready Standards remain the framework for instruction in the district, and quarterly assessments remain part of how progress is tracked. What remained open was how the work gets done, and by whom.
The Mobile County dispute is a case study in the friction that follows any major change to how schools assess students. Standards can be adopted in a boardroom, but they are implemented in thousands of classrooms by teachers who also have to write the tests, grade the papers and teach the next day’s lessons. How the district reconciles its assessment strategy with the workload it generates will determine whether the EQT experiment is remembered as a burden teachers endured or a professional investment they came to value.
