what about the students who are learning better digitally?

You don’t have to look far to find news of how badly online learning is failing many students.  With almost nine months of various forms of online and hybrid learning behind us, it would appear that the number of students failing classes is way up, as is the number of students failing every class, and that the achievement gap is widening quickly.  The whole situation is disheartening to everyone who cares about education.

The release of two Covid-19 vaccines this month has yielded a lot of needed hope.  There appears to be widespread optimism that enough Americans might have access to a vaccine by the start of next school year to allow for schools to fully reopen at that time.
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I’m as excited as anyone about the prospect of moving on from the constraints of Covid-19. I’m also, however, very nervous that we’re going to end this grand educational experiment without learning anything from it.  As I’ve written already, simply “going back to normal” would be a huge mistake.  Digital learning is certainly failing many students, but we should not be so quick to forget that what we were doing before Covid-19 was failing many of them, too.

Many students have been quite successful learning digitally.

One thing worth examining is that, while a huge number of students are faring miserably with digital learning, far more students are doing just fine with it (at least academically).  Some students are even performing better​ in online classes and would prefer to continue them even after the pandemic is behind us.  Rather than simply assuming digital learning is terrible for everyone, I think it is worth considering that there are really four groups of students to consider:

1. Students who have been less successful online than they were in-person
2. Students who have been more successful online than they were in-person
3. Students who have been equally successful in both situations
4. Students who haven’t been successful in either situation

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In my experience, we’re only hearing about group #1 in the news and on social media.  The rush to get everybody back in school is based in part on our perception that almost all students are in group #1 and we need to rescue them.  However, even if you read the news articles I linked earlier, it would appear that maybe 10-20 percent of students are in group #1.  The other 80-90 percent, then, fall into groups 2, 3, and 4. ​

We may be incorrectly perceiving that almost all students are struggling to learn online.

I want to focus today on group #2 - those students who are actually faring better learning online than they were under normal circumstances.  This is the most interesting group to consider, and almost nobody is talking about them.  It is also the most complex group, because it includes students who are NOT successful in school and ARE successful online, but it also includes students who are simply more successful online but were probably doing fine in school, too.  In my imagination, there are five broad groups of students who might fall into this category:

1. Students who have a bad experience attending school
2. Students who have heavy responsibility loads outside of school
3. Students in chaotic classroom environments
4. Students with a stay-at-home parent
5. Students with certain learning disabilities
   

​There are surely other types of students who fall into this category, but these are the ones that came to mind for me.  I'll explain each group in more detail now.

1. Students who have a bad experience attending school

Long before Covid-19, I knew students who chose online school or homeschool options simply because school was not a good place for them.  In most cases, they were treated badly by other students or by their teachers to the point that their academic progress was actually hindered by the school environment itself.  I cannot overstate the influence that bullying and testing pressure have in schools right now, nor the weight that they place on the shoulders of certain students.  Anxiety and self-harm rates are way, way up among students, and not just teenagers.  These plagues are appearing more and more in tweens, and even in younger students, too.  It isn’t hard for me to imagine that, unburdened by the bullying of other students or testing/performance pressure from teachers and administrators, a certain group of kids who have bad school experiences day after day may be thriving without the school environment.

      2. Students who have heavy responsibility loads outside of school

Many years ago, I knew two sisters who opted to homeschool for high school.  Both had very time-consuming extracurricular pursuits, and both wanted to have much more time to be involved in their family and community than they were able to be when school and homework were taking up 10+ hours of their day.  Much of their at-school time, they felt, was somewhat wasted, resulting in massive amounts of out-of-school homework that left them insufficient time for family, community, and personal pursuits.​

Students like these are likely faring much better digitally than they were before.  They have more freedom over their day and can save travel time, transition time, lunch time, and so on, handling their academic responsibilities in far less time.  Likewise, I imagine students who bear heavy responsibilities in their households or jobs are finding digital school a much more workable and successful option.

Some students can handle their learning in far less time than a traditional school day.

      3. Students in chaotic classroom environments

Back in May, the New York Times published an op-ed written by an 8th grader called Why I’m Learning More With Distance Learning Than I Do In School.  The student paints a picture of classrooms where her peers start fights, routinely disrespect teachers, talk out of turn, and generally create a chaotic environment where little learning can take place.  I’m certain that many students who find themselves in classrooms like these are thriving learning online compared to their unfortunate normal environment.

      4. Students with a stay-at-home parent

Last spring, in the two months when my students were learning from home, I had some second grade students make a year of progress in their writing.  A year.  These few students had stay-at-home parents who not only were able to give an extraordinary of one-on-one academic time to their children, but were thrilled to have the chance to do so.  

In typical times, parents have almost no access to what’s happening in classrooms academically.  We invite them to school events, but largely shut them out of classrooms.  Online learning has opened those doors to parents in unprecedented ways.  How often have we heard parents say things like “I really want to help my child be successful in school, but I don’t know what they’re learning or how it is being taught”?  In an online learning environment, parents have all the access to teaching that their students have, and some are happy to be able to be hands-on with that knowledge.  There is no educational experience like one-on-one learning, and some students are getting that access as a result.

             5. Students with certain learning, attention or behavior issues

I didn't think of this one on my own, but this piece in my local newspaper profiles a few families who feel that learning online has been an improvement for their students who have certain individual learning issues.  I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it.  It was very enlightening for me, and highlighted a group of students I hadn't thought of on my own.

Those are the five groups of students faring better online that I can imagine, but there are probably some others, too.  What I think is most important is to acknowledge that, while digital learning is failing a substantial number of students, it isn’t failing all - or even most - of them.  While we may not like to admit that some students are faring better farther away from us, what better time to acknowledge it than when we have just built the infrastructure to handle that truth?  One thing I think our public school system needs more than anything else is options, and we may have just stumbled into one we can continue to offer to students and families who find it beneficial.

I will admit that I don’t have a sense of how big the group of students faring better online might be.  However, if 10-20 percent are doing much worse online, I don’t think it is outrageous to assume the group having the opposite experience is probably about the same size.  With the release of the Covid-19 vaccine, we seem to be excitedly rushing to a return to normal in the name of rescuing the students and families who digital learning is leaving behind.  I hope, in that rush, we don’t trample the ones who it may have rescued.

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