“Are you ready for the Common Core?”

“Survey says teachers aren’t ready for the Common Core.”

“Districts haven’t been ready for the Common Core.”

Most of the discussion that I’ve seen around the Common Core lately is whether our country has sufficiently prepared the nation’s teachers for the Common Core State Standards. Even in places that profess to have dropped the Common Core (and replaced them with Common Core-like standards), the idea of “readiness” seems to create an urgency in the face of pushback and doubling down on the reforms of the last decade. Yet, it also reminds me how cartoonish folks look talking about education as a whole, as if the preparation of teachers for the CCSS is akin to preparing for national disasters for beach-based cities or … opponents to Hulk Hogan in the mid-80s and 90s.

Akin to Hulkamania, I often look at the Common Core paraphernalia and fanfare as a well-funded, bipartisan effort, bringing together strange bedfellows in legion for a crusade that might win. Painful as it is to watch, the script drawn up in backrooms to move the action forward give everyone an accepted understanding of what they’re signing up to. If you think I’m dancing in my analogy, imagine the stretch journalists and bloggers have had to make to speak about Common Core readiness, a phrase turned frequently since the beginning of Common Core lore.

With two years of CCSS tests under New York’s belt, for example, we still have gaps in what so-called experts believe the CCSS should look like in classrooms and how actual practitioners see the Common Core working in their classrooms. As test scores go up and the current scale scores remain stringent for levels 3 and 4, it seems hard to tell whether the Common Core itself has transformed what’s happening in the classroom or if the teachers have kept doing as they do the last time test scores went up. Did everyone understand the new curriculum they were given last year or are the old textbooks now adaptive to what teachers believe the standards are saying? Can the same texts be used or just moved to different grades?

Or, do we let the Common Core run wild on us, with no discernible characteristics of preparedness available to us other than test items that may or may not look suspiciously like other tests we’ve seen?

Even as people attempt to write what they mean by “ready,” those of us in the classroom look at the Common Core like a wrestler does jumping from the top rope: a costly move that, if successful, works to great effect for both the wrestler and the onlookers, but if unsuccessful, could do lots more harm than good, especially since it took so long to get up top. The emphasis, again, ought to be pedagogy because it means we can sift through (if not develop) tasks that, regardless of whether we like the Common Core, will teach students the skills and concepts to get them through any material.

Despite the plethora of now-labeled curricular materials and videos out there showing “Common Core,” the idea of readiness will continue to run wild until teachers work together to develop themselves, each other, and the district to come up with a realistic plan.

What are YOU gonna do, brother?