A common trope in US television shows is school students interacting (often bullying) in front of lockers in a corridor.
Are these lockers in corridor actually a thing in US schools or a manufactured storytelling prop?
They sure are.
They were definitely a thing in my middle school and high school, but that was back in the '80s. No idea what the norm is these days.
Where are you, and what’s the situation in schools in your area?
Absolutely.
My older daughter’s high school here in Luxembourg (but modeled on French educational traditions) also has lockers in the corridors. They’re not the rattle-bang metal kind I had back when I was in school, and that you see in movies and TV shows; they’re more like those wooden-door cubbies you see in spa changing areas. But they’re definitely lockers.
Now I’m curious about schools that don’t have lockers. Where are students supposed to put stuff?
Apparently they are fading away. (The lockers, not the students. Some of the stuff might fade away with digital textbooks.)
As a kid in the UK in the 80s-90s I had a bag and I carried it with me all day.
Same for me in Canada. What always surprised me was the tv shows shot at schools in LA that were open air.
Where else would they be? My school had over 2000 students. We still had full-sized lockers, not halves, so they had to be everywhere. Getting your first locker was an important ritual.
Germany. Same here. We had some lockers in the school building, but they were very few (surely not sufficient for each pupil to get one) and in an inconvenient location, so hardly anybody ever used them. I would simply pack my bag at home each morning and bring the books and other items I’d need during the day at school.
Back in the late Devonian, when I was a school, we had lockers. In the junior school (1-7 back then) we had a locker for our sports/gym/pool gear. In the senior school (8-12 back then) we had lockers outside the classrooms. Useful for general stuff.
The thing that always struck me was that at school, back then we always had a home. A particular classroom and desk that was ours. As one went on to higher levels, the amount of time spent in the home classroom dropped. Science subjects were taken in the labs, mathematics classes were in a common classroom that took only those students doing higher mathematics. But the start and end of the day involved circling past home desk. One could leave some stuff in one’s desk. Nothing valuable, but it was still something of a home.
Once one got to university, there was no home. You carried your books and stuff about from lecture to lecture. There were a limited number of lockers, and nefarious tactics for reserving one early in the year if you really wanted one. But the place was just a huge sprawling mass of offices, labs and lecture theatres. Not until reaching advanced study did one get a home again. And for the unlucky this was often just a desk in a large room. PhDs writing up often got a tiny hole in the wall office.
I returned to teach a couple of subjects this last semester, after a long time out in industry. The place has changed dramatically. The place is comparatively deserted, yet the actual student numbers have doubled. Everything seems to be done remotely, and in one class of 450 students, I got 40 odd turning up in person to lectures. Yet the amenities afforded to students are a real step up. The place is replete with all manner of spaces where undergraduate students can sit, study, chill, and do stuff. But there still isn’t a home base. Nowhere that they can call their own. And I have yet to find lockers. Students just amble about with a laptop and little more. Which isn’t all good. I have students tell me straight up that they don’t really cope with reading books. Indeed some don’t seem to cope with reading much at all. So lockers may truly be a thing of the past.
I did too, but I also used my locker to store my heavy coat in winter, and so that I wouldn’t have to carry my textbooks for all my classes around with me all day (including at lunch).
I think many schools nowadays have restrictions on bags and backpacks, out of fear of students carrying weapons with them.
But, as @Darren_Garrison’s linked article notes, students don’t carry nearly as many textbooks around with them because “many of their school resources and assignments are digitized.”
Simply never crossed my mind that there would be such a thing as a school WITHOUT hall lockers!
My high school had metal lockers. But when I attended my 50th class reunion, we toured the campus, and all the lockers had been removed.
My school had lockers in the hallway. There may have been enough for every student to have one but we didn’t - I believe some students, like those in student government, did. We all had gym lockers, but they weren’t big enough t o fit more than sneakers, T shirt and sneakers. There were larger lockers we used while we were actually in gym. We carried everything with us from class to class - we had a homeroom but there was nowhere secure in it to store our things.
Ditto!
And my jacket on rainy days. Can’t imagine stuffing a wet coat (whether from rain or snow) into a bag with books and carrying it around.
I didn’t have lockers in my Catholic elementary school (although we had cloakrooms, where we hung our coats, and there were shelves if you needed to stash something). But there were lockers in my high school (built 1961). There were also separate lockers in the gym changing rooms.
I’m sure it was pretty standard in high school construction in the 1960s and 1970s, and probably beyond that.
Having grown up going to greater LA’s open air schools I was always amazed at scenes of schools set in big cities in the northeast showing imposing two or even 3 story red brick buildings. Seemed to young me like something dark and foreboding from a couple centuries ago in a land far away.
It’s funny but not surprising to me how as kids our perspective is skewed by our necessarily limited experiences. But it is surprising to me how much we assume everywhere else is the same, rather than assuming we’re one tiny arbitrary sample of a vast and varied world. Given how imagination-driven kids are, the default assumption of a homogenous world seems boringly odd. Although if your name is Calvin, it’s probably not so boring … or homogenous. 
My own middle school (grades 6-8 ages 11-13) and high school (grades 9-12 ages 14-17) had lockers for every student. This was during the last of the '60s and first half of the 70s. Such that most exterior or corridor wall surfaces were covered with them two or three rows tall.
A big ritual on Day 1 Hour 1 of the new school year was finding out which locker you had been assigned, and where your friends’ new lockers were. And for the lockers with built-in locks, working to memorize your new combination.
Ref @Francis_Vaughan’s good comments about a “home” … your locker was your home. The total amount of books and supplies needed for a full day’s 6 or 7 classes, each held in a different room (and maybe in a different building) was far more than anyone could carry around all day in a single bag. Plus a jacket or sweater in the cooler parts of the year.
When I transitioned to college I missed having that home. Although I sure understood why on a campus that big with that many buildings and students it wasn’t practical to stop by a fixed home between each class to swap materials.
I could sure see that if modern kids had a tablet instead of textbooks, then a single backpack could probably hold all their stuff.
ETA: ref @OldOlds just below: In CA back then originally elementary school was grades 1-6 and “junior high” was grades 7-8 only. As the baby boom student population bulge moved through the system they moved grade 6 out from the elementary schools and into the junior high schools. Which were each renamed “middle schools” as they took on that extra grade at the bottom.
I had the lockers in both my Junior High (that’s right, it wasn’t Middle School back then, dammit) and high school. The schools shared a gym, and I also had an assigned gym locker for my gym clothes.
Near Boston, 80s.
We have lockers lining both sides of the hallways in 3/4 of our school. Our students don’t have desks like they used to have desks in the old days. There is no storage space, nor is there a rack underneath the chairs for storage. This works because textbooks are obsolete. Their “textbook” is their Chromebook, and it is also their “notebook”.
The modern school is an amazing place. We have many older members here, and they probably have no idea what it is like in 2024.