Mobile County Public School System leaders faced questions this week from a teachers’ union representative concerned that a new approach to quarterly testing is adding hours of uncompensated work to educators’ schedules. The exchange, played out in front of the board that governs one of the largest school systems in Alabama, turned on a deceptively administrative question — who writes a test — and what it costs the people who have to write it.
The union’s complaint
Jesse McDaniel, who represents Mobile teachers for the Alabama Education Association, addressed the MCPSS Board of School Commissioners during its March 24 meeting, telling members he had fielded complaints from more than a dozen teachers about the extra planning time required to build individualized End of Quarter Tests, known as EQTs, at each of the district’s 54 elementary schools. The EQTs are the district’s own quarterly checkpoints, and under the new approach the schools themselves — rather than a central office — are responsible for producing them.
“I had a couple of teachers give me a call and raise a concern with each elementary school being required to develop its own EQT test, whereas in the past the tests have been created by academic affairs or the central office,” McDaniel told the board. “There’s been no expression of what the value of this is to measuring the district as a whole, and I fail to understand how that is being done best when each facility is having to develop its own test.”
McDaniel said the district has not provided special workdays or additional planning periods for teachers to design the new tests, leaving many to complete the work after school hours or on weekends. The complaint is a familiar one in teaching, where assessments, paperwork and curriculum changes routinely compete for the same finite hours, and where “extra duty” often means unpaid duty. “This time is important to our faculty and staff,” he said. “I would ask the board to please reconsider how these tests are being developed. If they’re going to be developed school by school, perhaps that could be done on a voluntary basis or special planning time could be allotted.”
McDaniel’s framing stopped short of opposing school-based testing altogether. His objection was to the workload and the lack of a stated purpose — a distinction that let the board consider the process without treating the issue as a fight over whether the tests should exist at all.
Why the tests changed
The EQTs are given each quarter across the district to gauge whether students are keeping pace with state and district learning standards throughout the school year. Unlike the state’s annual standardized assessments, which arrive with results too late to change instruction, quarterly tests are meant to catch problems while there is still time in the school year to fix them. That makes their design a live instructional question rather than a bookkeeping one.
This year’s shift toward school-level test design coincided with a broader transition to the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards, the state’s version of the Common Core State Standards that the Alabama Legislature adopted in 2010 and which are still being phased in across classrooms. The new standards moved material between grade levels, changed the way math concepts build on each other and demanded more evidence-based reading and writing — which meant last year’s tests no longer matched what teachers were being asked to teach.
That transition proved rocky in its early stages. The first-quarter EQT results were ultimately thrown out this school year after the district saw significant drops in math and language arts scores tied to the new standards. Discarding a quarter of testing data is a costly admission, and it left the district needing assessments that actually matched the new standards — quickly, and 54 schools at a time.
Teachers began building their own math EQTs starting in the third quarter, according to a district spokesperson, part of an effort to better align the tests with what was actually being taught in classrooms. The logic ran in the opposite direction from McDaniel’s: rather than a burden imposed from above, the district presented school-level design as a way to make the tests fit the instruction each building had actually delivered, in a year when the ground rules themselves had changed.
The administration’s defense
Superintendent Martha Peek told the board that most of the feedback the district has received about the change has been positive, even as she acknowledged the added workload has frustrated some educators. “The EQTs this year are moving into the Alabama College and Career Ready Standards and we needed to align our EQTs more closely to those standards,” Peek said. “Some principals and teachers asked to have the latitude to develop their own EQTs.”
“Anytime you do something new there’s pros and cons,” she added. “Evidently some people are having a problem with the extra time, but overall the responses we’ve gotten are positive. Most teachers and principals have liked the opportunity to really study and know the standards better.” The superintendent’s account positioned the workload complaint as the growing pain of a change many in the schools had asked for, not a policy imposed without consultation.
Chief Academic Officer Karen Mohr said giving teachers ownership over test design was intended to ease pressure on classroom staff, not add to it, by letting them build assessments around the material they know their students have covered. “Teachers study the standards to identify what students should know and should be able to do with the information,” Mohr said. “Teachers develop the EQT to align with a standard. The EQTs are submitted to ensure the level of rigor and accuracy in assessing a standard.” The submission step, she noted, is what keeps 54 individually written tests from drifting into 54 different standards of difficulty.
Peek characterized the shift as ultimately about giving schools more autonomy and a stronger voice in how student learning is measured, rather than relying solely on tests handed down from the central office. The autonomy argument carries real weight in a district as large as Mobile County’s, where a single central test must span schools with very different pacing, populations and instructional approaches; the counterargument is that autonomy, like everything else in a school building, is paid for in someone’s time.
What happens next
Third-quarter EQTs across the Mobile County system were completed in late March, closing out the first full round of school-built assessments since the discarded first quarter. The results of those tests — and whether they show the same drops that doomed the first-quarter data — will shape how much patience the board and the public extend to the new approach.
It remains to be seen whether the board will revisit how the tests are developed for the remainder of the school year or take up McDaniel’s request for dedicated planning time or a voluntary approach at future meetings. What is not in dispute is the underlying stakes: quarterly tests exist so the district can catch a struggling student or a misaligned classroom while the school year can still be corrected, and both the union and the administration want those tests to work. The disagreement is over who should build them, and who pays for the hours it takes.
The March 24 session was not the first time the EQT program has drawn scrutiny at the board table, but it was the most direct challenge yet to the district’s testing workflow. McDaniel’s dozen-plus complainants represent a small fraction of the teachers affected — the change touches every elementary school in a system that spans the county from Citronelle to Grand Bay — and his argument was that the district should not be scaling a new process on the unpaid evenings of the people expected to run it.
For parents, the practical meaning of the dispute is straightforward. Quarterly tests drive the pace of the classroom: they tell a teacher in October what a re-teaching cycle in November should cover, and they give administrators an early warning about schools where the new standards are not landing. A test written by a teacher who knows her students can capture that more precisely than a central form; a test written by a teacher exhausted from building it after hours can capture it less well. The board will be weighing that trade-off when the EQT question returns to its agenda.
The Alabama Education Association, for its part, has long treated workload as a core advocacy issue, and quarterly test construction has become the newest front. The organization’s state leadership opposed the standards transition at various points, but McDaniel’s remarks steered clear of that fight and stayed on the narrower ground of time and compensation. That narrowness is deliberate: it asks the board for a scheduling fix rather than a policy reversal, which is the version of the complaint most likely to find votes around the table.