Sometimes when going out to dinner, I have a difficult time choosing what to order. The process usually involves asking the waiter what he or she would recommend. This is a low-stakes decision and yet it can still be difficult to make. Currently in education we are making many high-stakes decisions with long-term consequences.

Recently, 45 states and three territories adopted the Common Core standards in English language arts and mathematics (www.corestandards.org/), which means for the first time in the nation’s history there is some consistency among states in what students should know and be able to do in these subject areas. Since the adoption of the standards, two different tests are being developed and each state has committed to one or the other.

The decision as to which test to use with our students is high-stakes. While both tests are tightly aligned with the standards in terms of content, they are designed in ways that suggest slightly different uses. There is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) Consortium www.parcconline.org/ and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) www.smarterbalanced.org/. (Sample test items are available on each of their websites.)

There are three basic differences between the tests. The first is that PARCC is delivered on the computer but is fixed in terms of the questions students will have to answer. Every test-taker gets an equivalent set of questions. The SBAC is computer adaptive, which means that the questions posed to students are based on their previous answers. They get easier or harder depending on how the students perform. This means that schools who use the SBAC will have robust information about their students’ performances at all levels, not just at the proficient level, which is the case for fixed-delivery tests.

The second difference is that while the PARCC test has features that can be manipulated such as font size, the SBAC has features that cater to a wider range of learning needs. For example, there are sound files for all the texts so that they can be read to the students. What this means is that a broader range of students, including special-education students, can participate in taking the test.

The third is that the PARCC has a midyear test very much like the end-of-year test, which means that schools can use the test to measure students’ progress and, as a result, a teacher’s performance. SBAC has interim assessments that can be used at any time of the year to inform instruction, but they are less oriented toward teacher evaluation.

New York state has chosen to work on and with PARCC.

There is evidence that those teachers who are able to help students perform better on standardized tests make a big difference in their students’ lives. Therefore, using students’ performance on standardized tests helps us understand the effectiveness of a particular teacher, administrator, and school. And yet …

In its current configuration, the SBAC test promises to provide more robust information about all the students who take the test, rather than only those at the proficient level. We will get more accurate information about a broader range of students. That is compelling.

Students in schools will not be taking the new test until 2014-15. As I think about the decisions states have to make, I ask myself who do we want to be as a society and, perhaps most importantly, who do we want to be to our children? Just as I would prefer to go to a restaurant that focuses on the quality of my experience as a customer rather than primarily on their reviews, I want to be part of a society that is committed to being responsible to all students’ learning rather than one that foregrounds the use of tests for the purposes of accountability.