California parents should be forgiven this week for any urge they feel to throw up their hands at all the confusing test scores just released to the public. The state's accountability system was enough to try to master; now we've got a federal accountability system layered on top of it.

When parents receive their children's individual scores, sometime between now and early September, they should sit down, take a breath and understand that there is useful information in the middle of this muddle. And while we wish the state would simplify this overly complex accountability web -- though let's not count on the confusion ending anytime too soon -- let's consider three pieces of navigational advice.

* Don't be tempted to compare your child's performance on last year's SAT-9 to this year's CAT-6. You don't need to know what the acronyms stand for; just know that this past school year, the state switched from one nationally normed test (that is, a test that compares a student's performance with others across the country) to another, and that means the results aren't directly comparable.

If your son slipped from the 85th percentile to the 78th, that may simply be a reflection of his unfamiliarity with the new test or of the effects of comparing him this year with a different group of students from around the country. Next year, when he takes the CAT-6 again, you can eyeball his year-to-year progress with greater confidence.

* Don't panic if your school did not make "Adequate Yearly Progress," or AYP. Roughly 45 percent of the state's schools failed to meet their AYP goal, which is a new federal designation established under the president's No Child Left Behind Act.

There are myriad ways that a school can fall short: It must show certain test score gains not just overall but for subgroups, including English-language learners, different ethnic groups and special education students.

This is not to suggest AYP should be ignored. It carries important messages for schools, and the parents to whom they must ultimately be accountable, about their strengths and weaknesses. (For parents in high-poverty schools that have consistently failed to make AYP, the federal government has ordered districts to offer the choice of a better-performing school, and transportation to it. That's an offer parents should not refuse.)

This is the beginning of a complex and ambitious federal accountability program that is likely to get tweaked significantly in coming years.

* For a sense of your child's individual progress, look closely at her score on the California standards tests. We now have three years of scores in English/language arts and two years in math, and also in history and science at the high school level.

Did she answer a greater proportion of the questions than she did last year or the year before? This is how you can answer the all-important question of whether she's meeting the high expectations California has set for her.

From a statewide perspective, these scores have been improving, which is exactly the kind of return we'd like to see on recent investments in school reform.

None of this is simple. Nor do test scores tell us all we need to know about schools, whose mission must be broader than just one of readying students to ace exams. But if we feel inundated by numbers and acronyms, it's important to remember that they represent key data about how our children and their schools are performing. Too much information may sometimes seem like a curse, but we'd prefer it any day to too little.