You know the routine by heart. Open your Chromebook, navigate to Classlink, type in your student ID. That string of digits burned into your brain since elementary school. Punch in your password, and hit enter. The page loads. You wait.

Whoops, an error has occurred. Please try again.

You try again. Another load. Another error. You refresh. You close the tab. You reopen it. Finally, mercifully, Schoology loads, and somewhere in the “upcoming” section, half-hidden beneath a wall of course tiles, is an assignment that was due four seconds ago. Your GPA and sanity diminishing, you resign  yourself to Schoology’s irritating imperfections.

After five years of constant inefficiency, the wait is almost over. School administration has announced that beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) will be transitioning from Schoology to Google Classroom as its primary learning management system, ending a relationship that began not out of choice, but out of necessity.

When RRISD announced the suspension of all school operations on March 16, 2020, nobody expected it to last. Teachers scrambled, students adjusted, and Google Classroom briefly became the classroom for thousands of students across the district. But as it became clear COVID-19 wasn’t leaving anytime soon, RRISD began planning for its first three weeks of the following school year to go completely virtual. In order to make the transition from in-person to completely virtual, it was clear that the district needed a more centralized platform. Enter Schoology, marketed as “the Premier K-12 Learning Management System.” It was a reasonable solution for an unreasonable time. But what was meant to be temporary was calcified into a five-year-long habit, and slowly, cracks began to appear.

The criticisms of Schoology aren’t anything unique or significant. They’re just daily and annoying. The login process alone is its own little ordeal. Schoology lives behind Classlink, a separate sign-on portal, which means simply opening the login page requires navigating through a host of extra hurdles. On personal laptops it’s even worse: navigate to Classlink, authenticate, then launch Schoology, instead of just opening a tab. It’s seemingly inconsequential until you have to repeat it every day for five years.

Then there are the constant outages, which at this point are less of a bug and more of a feature. Like clockwork, nearly every other major test or quiz, Schoology’s functions begin to deteriorate. All of a sudden, the entire class is now focused on navigating through yet another logistical hurdle, rather than being able to complete the work they have to. Students have built up a muscle memory around them: refresh, wait, refresh, close, reopen. They show up right when you need the platform most, the morning something is due, the five minutes before a test, the moment a teacher pulls up an assignment in class.

However, these days are far in the rearview mirror. Google Classroom sidesteps basically all of this. Chromebooks log students in automatically. Everything syncs to Google calendar. The “to do” tab tracks missing and upcoming assignments in one place, and unlike Schoology’s ‘upcoming’ section, it doesn’t wait until four seconds before a deadline to remind you something exists. Since almost everything students turn in is already a Google Doc or Google Slides, the integration is seamless in a way Schoology never quite managed.

There’s also the “recently completed” feature in Schoology, which is either a relief or a quiet gut punch depending on how your week went. Immediately upon entering the page, students are forced to view every assignment that’s been recently graded. For some, this is a convenient way to keep up, however,  for many, it’s yet another irritating feature that only increases stress. Though there’s a strong case to be made for being prompt with checking your grades, it should be a choice students get to make on their own.

Google Classroom isn’t perfect, but it works the way students already work. It fits into the tools they already use. It doesn’t make them fight to log in. And honestly, after five years of errors, outages, and inefficiencies, that last part alone might be enough.