How the remote school experience, with fewer distractions and less social pressure from peers, makes learning easier for some students
“At home, it seems to be a bit easier to focus on all the work,” said one eighth grader who was struggling in school. “Everything in general is easier.” Tweets: @nytimes , @pfagell , @donaldclark , and @suptenfield Tweets: @nytimes : Some students have found it easier to participate in remote classes without the social pressures of a physical classroom. For others, the avoidance of distractions like disruptive classmates or bullies are a relief. https://www.nytimes.com/... Phyllis Fagell / @pfagell : “For some, the absence of disruptive classmates has been a boon. Others like working at their own pace. Some find it easier to participate in class w/out the social pressures or a teacher making direct eye contact 6 inches from their desk.”@nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/... Donald Clark / @donaldclark : One side of the online experience you rarely hear... https://twitter.com/... Susan Enfield / @suptenfield : “Not Everyone Hates Remote Learning. For These Students, It's a Blessing.” I would add that some of our teachers feel the same. As district leaders we need to be collaborating with students and staff to develop ongoing online learning opportunities. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
By late spring 2020 the aggregate verdict on emergency remote learning was bleak — schools couldn't agree on fair assessment, access to devices was uneven, and teaching got harder, per the broad review of the spring's failures. This piece documents the counter-case hiding inside those averages: students for whom removing the classroom's social layer — disruptive peers, bullies, participation pressure — made school work better.
That minority matters because it became the design brief for what came next. The districts in Texas, New York, and California building permanent full-time virtual schools explicitly cite vulnerable children as the audience, and the finding echoes pre-pandemic practice at Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, which built its model around student-teacher relationships rather than replicating a classroom online.
First-order effects
- Struggling students like the quoted eighth grader get immediate relief from classroom dynamics — fewer distractions and less peer pressure translate directly into easier participation and completed work, a dynamic counselors like Phyllis Fagell observed in real time.
Second-order effects
- Districts gain evidence for a two-track model: the same medium that failed most students in spring 2020 justifies keeping a permanent virtual option for the subset it served well, forcing administrators to segment by learner profile instead of choosing one mode for all.
Third-order effects
- If the permanent-virtual-school pattern holds, schooling structurally bifurcates — a physical default plus opt-in remote tracks — pushing educators toward the individual-comes-first approach already piloted in Rhode Island's personalized learning programs, with equity of device access becoming the gating constraint rather than pedagogy.
The trend: K-12 education is moving from a single physical classroom default toward segmented delivery, where remote tracks are kept permanently for the students whose learning the classroom environment was actively harming.