What are high schools in America like?

In My Humble Opinion
1

On the local news at 9, there was a story of how a high school student was beat up at the back of his class while the teacher was busy up front. Another student video taped it.

I was absolutely horrified. But, somehow, I did not feel surprised.

I attended American high schools but they were overseas. It seems that high schools overseas are very different from high schools here in the US; I have heard that high schools overseas are like private schools in America.

My impression is that they are horrid, painful, unsafe institutions full of bullying and teasing (enough to make people suicidal and even attempt suicide), extremely cliqueish, lots of hazing, with the vast majority of students somehow sexually active and imbibing alcoholic beverages in an irresponsible manner, with a good number of students engaging in (selling, providing, or using) illegal drugs, with lax and unconcerned faculties. High schools in America amost seem like portals of Hell. Such descriptions make episodes like Columbine perfectly understandable, and makes parents’ worrying about their children also perfectly understandable (although it makes me wonder why they aren’t more worried or involved to eradicate these evil elements).

Is this true? How do people survive emotionally (and spiritually) intact? Is there a difference between public and private schools? How much of this is present in most cases and which in only problem areas (I believe “inner city” schools tend to, understandably, be more horrid).

So, tell me, what are high schools in America really like?

WRS/Thû

2

I guess I’m not in a position to answer, really, since I attended a Canadian highschool.

I went to a mainly white, middle-upper class suburbian highschool. I wasn’t exactly cool, part of the in crowd, but I was never involved in altercations. I was never made fun. My highschool experience was almost entirely positive; I did NOT experience any of the American highschool stereotypes.

I am always amazed when I hear there stories out of the U.S. of the cliques that exist. I absolutely did not observe this in my highschool.

3

I went to a HS in the largest city in the US. No cliques. People who cared about cliques were considered shallow.

Then again, we were serious kids who had fought to get into a public specialized academic school when the Bronx was burning around us. We were there to get an education so we could get the hell out of our lower middle class or even ghetto lives. No drugs except for a little pot, no gangs, little violence, none of my friends getting pregnant, only rich kids spending money on new clothes.

If you hear otherwise, remember that teenagers love to over-dramatize and whine, and there’s quite an industry that helps them do it now, hoping to capitalize on their insecurities.

4

It is a really hard question to answer because the U.S. is so large and diverse. You could probably find examples of just about anything if you looked hard enough. A high school experience in inner city Detroit is not going to be at all similar to one in Beverely HIlls. I went to a very poor, rural high school in Louisiana so any examples I give won’t be typical. We had some racial tension, incompetent and apathetic teachers, lots of bullying, plenty of drugs, lots of dropouts, and facilities that were so bad that three of the five buildings were condemned while I was there.

My wife went to a very affluent, public, suburban Boston suburb and I gather she had it pretty good. There was some bullying, lots of cliques, and some drugs but it was a generally good experience for her.

The only point that can make a general comment on is that bullying in American high schools is widespread and brutal. In many cases, it is just a no-holds-barred torture fest on a person or on a group of people. I was subjected to about 10% of what I saw happen to other people emotionally and physically but I was about to snap myself.

5

I went to a public school in a smallish city (~35,000) and didn’t have any of the problems you mentioned despite being 1) overweight 2) obviously poor 3) a geek and 4) relatively unattractive, things that I’ve learned are evidently huge no-nos for teens from such academic programs as Saved by the Bell, Boston Public, and the Revenge of the Nerds movies.

I have absolutely no doubt that there was plenty of drinking, shooting up, and sex going on in my school of around 1,200 students but I was a loner and was thus left alone. People mocked me occasionally but it was the exception and not the rule, even when I was the teacher’s pet, which was once or twice.

High school might have been horrible for some but it wasn’t for me and most people I’ve talked to or heard from about the issue all say the same thing. My sister (who is eight years older) and my mom both had a hell of a lot worse time in school than I did so I think the popular conception of it being hell might be a little outdated but being carried on by inertia.

Just my own personal theory though.

6

I went to private school in the midwest, so I was pretty surprised when I moved to San Diego during high school. It was pretty damn scary. Tall chain-link fences around the school, with police and police dogs patrolling. You have to go through a metal detector to get into the school. Once you get in the school, even scarier. It was like, “if you want to live, pick a gang to join right away.” I couldn’t imagine how anyone could learn anything when they’re scared for their life everyday.

Turned out, I had learned everything in two years of high school in the midwest that kids learn in four years in public schools in California, so I immediately switched to an alternative school program and basically tested out of my junior & senior years.

7

As you can see, you’ll have to refine your question, WeRSauron. Suburban, rural, or urban kids? Rich or poor schools? Black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Latin kids, gay kids, girl kids, kids who climb on rocks (sorry!)? Specialized schools like mine in academics, schools for music, schools that care about sports, schools like mine that didn’t even have a football field? Don’t forget parochial schools and yeshivas and boarding schools. '70s, '80s, or '90s or now?

If we know exactly what kind of school you’re interested in, it’ll be easier; otherwise you’ll get a whole series of disjointed essays. :smiley:

8

Current semi-Urban Public High School attender here.

I heard all these horror stories about high school, but it’s really not bad at all. I’m far from “cool” or “popular,” but I’ve been only minimally harassed and even then it was playfull and not malicious. Very poor place, there are cops around everywhere. We had a last year. The worst I’ve gotten is knives pulled on me though. And yeah, there is a lot of use. A lot. But its not a big deal.

9

As you can see by reading the other posts, conditions vary greatly.

Basically, public schools reflect their surroundings. Private schools are generally considered better (stricter teachers/admin, stricter or more affluent parents). There are always exceptions, good and bad, though. The new-fangled charter schools seem to be a mixed bag, so far.

One thing they all have in common, though, is that they are all institutions. If I had kids, I’m not sure I’d want them institutionalized.

10

I’m interested in high schools, generally, of today.

I expect there to be differences between rural and urban, private and public, city and suburban high schools - but maybe with enough responses some major similarities and major differences can be observed.

I must express I am beginning to feel quite concerned about American youth.

WRS

11

All I can tell you is my experience at a small rural (public) high school in west Kentucky. I graduated in 1996.

I was the class fat girl. In some ways I was an outcast, but I had my own group of friends and fortunately no desire to hang out with the “popular” group. My school had cliques but I don’t recall having names for each particular group. I guess if you had to label mine we would have been the “Smart Bookish Outcasts” clan. We hung out in the library at lunch. Despite my rather low status in the caste system, pretty much anyone could talk to anyone else if the need arose, like for a class project.

The lines were drawn at the lunch table. You did not sit at a lunch table you didn’t belong at. It’s not that you’d get beat up, it Just Wasn’t Done.

I never felt unsafe at school, but this was before the days of Columbine and West Paducah. The bullying I experienced wasn’t physical, it was emotional/verbal. The boys that harassed me were outwardly aggressive. The girls that disliked me simply ignored/excluded me. The teachers I had did their best, but no teacher in the world can stop teenagers from acting like assholes.

I did see drugs being passed around in my classroom on a couple of occasions (pot). The majority of kids at my school did NOT do drugs. I imagine most of them had sex by graduation, but I wouldn’t call it an overwhelming majority. I was a virgin (by choice) when I graduated, and definitely not the only one.

In my high school experience, being different was Not OK. Being a fat girl at my school seemed to be the worst sin of all, although being gay would probably have been just as bad (especially if you were a guy). There were no openly gay guys in my graduating class, but once we were gone, those that were came out of the closet. Fat guys had it easy, they had girlfriends and were judged more on their abilities. You could be popular and be a fat guy. There were no popular fat girls, ever.

We were overwhelmingly white, but there was no racial tension as far as I could tell between black students and white students. It really wasn’t a consideration. We had interracial couples and it was no big deal. I can’t recall ever hearing any kind of ethnic slurs used; I don’t think it would have gone over well, either. There were other schools in the area – two in particular – that had a reputation for being racist. We made fun of them for being such dickheads.

How do people survive emotionally (and spiritually) intact?

Being in Upward Bound saved me, I think. I had exposure to kids from other schools, who HAD to get to know me before making a decision about me because there, I had no reputation that preceded me. I ended up with two major social circles that didn’t overlap.

I also wrote a lot. And I was involved in a lot of church stuff.

I think the key to surviving high school is finding your niche. You’ve either gotta find something to do in school that you enjoy (drama, art, band, whatever), or you’ve gotta find something outside of school to keep you sane. And you’ve gotta keep in mind at the age of 15 that the people going around torturing others will, in 10 years, be either fat, in rehab, trying to raise 3 kids on their own because the loser they married is in prison, or working for their parents in a dead-end job. If you wanna have a good life, treat everyone as your equal in high school. Karma catches up to everybody.

12

Recent experience, small town Texas, addressing your list:

horrid - no
unsafe - no, not really; occasional fights, no weapons
bullying/teasing - eh, some; maybe no more than “normal” for a bunch of kids; the average student did not tease/bully, or get teased/bullied
cliqueish - groups of pals, certainly, but everyone knows everyone (small town); most get along, but not everyone likes everyone
racial issues - minimal; they all grew up together, play sports together, etc.
hazing - no
sex/alcohol - not an epidemic or anything; some are wild, some are not
drugs - a little, and they get in trouble for it sooner or later
faculty/admin - they care; many are overworked
painful - for some; not everybody’s happy in school
academic rigor - eh; the better students can get a fair amount of learning

parents worrying? - sometimes they’re part of the problem.
The school doesn’t control it all; students come in with whatever their prevailing home environment is, and that’s what teachers/admin have to work with. Not to excuse the schools, but when things are bad, there’s usually quite a few to blame.
You want a horror story? Check this out:

“How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million”

(The immediate problem was a weak principal and a few bad parents/students. As for systemic problems …)

13

I attended a pretty well-off high school in Northern Kentucky for three years. It wasn’t so bad; while I was teased pretty heavily in earlier grades, most of that disappeared, and with a few exceptions the same people who’d teased me were all very nice. Er. To my face, at least. Bear in mind that by that time I was pretty warped socially. I had no niche; I had no friends in school, and only one total; I failed all of my classes and was unable to behave normally around my peers.

Still, I had very few bullying problems. I was pushed around by the goth clique, strangely enough, but it wasn’t awful and had cleared up by the time I left. I finished off high school in a self-study program oriented toward working adults, but populated almost entirely by problem teenagers. It was in the middle of a not-so-nice area, but there were few opportunities for social interaction, so I have little to add about urban crap. I imagine it’s worse, at least if the calibre of student at that place is any indication.

My two cents: if the students have more to worry about than academics and the usual teen angst - say, poverty - there’ll be cliques and gangs and problems and everyone’ll be worse off overall. In a comparably affluent neighborhood, it’s much easier to coast along.

14

I was lucky enough to escape from the mainstream public school system partway trhough my freshman year. I was accepted at and transferred to a local progressive “alternative school”. It was a unique program that gave us a lot of freedom in our own education (we had complete control over our own course selection and scheduling) but that also required us to treat each other with respect and follow a strict anti-harassment policy.

This policy prohibited not just actual violence, but also verbal harassment. And mocking someone because of their personality (“You suck 'cause you’re a geek!”) was considered just as serious a violation as mocking someone because of their sex/race/sexual orientation/religon/politics. The enforcement of this policy wasn’t just left up to the teachers and staff, either. We were expected to police ourselves too, and in the majority of cases a simple “Hey, harassment!” from a peer was enough to stop someone who’d crossed the line. Those who didn’t knock it off immediately could be subject to formal disciplinary action, and repeated offenses would mean getting kicked back out into the mainstream public school system.

I was very happy there. My experience at the mainstream school was basically as you described:

…although I do not recall there being any hazing and I doubt people were as sexually active as they claimed to be. Oh, and this was about as All-American a high school as you could get – Midwestern, a few thousand students, mostly middle-class and white but with a significant (and mostly lower income) number of black and Hispanic kids, big emphasis on the football team, etc. It had been the featured high-school-of-the-month in Seventeen magazine the year before I started there.

15

I graduated a year ago from what I would consider a middle to upper-middle class public high school in the midwest (Indianapolis) of roughly 1400. I didn’t really have any complaints about racism, bullies, elitism, etc. In fact, the concept of a bully seems more like something from sixth or seventh grade, not high school. I believe my class was fairly mature in many regards, especially towards those that are different in some way. There were openly gay guys that, although they were the butt of jokes, weren’t openly ridiculed or ostracized and were pretty much accepted. I was pretty dorky and the only time I ever recall being openly, maliciously teased was in middle school, not high.

What did scare me a little was watching the classes below us advance each year – they seemed wildly out of place for a building meant for learning. A lot of their girls got pregnant, too.

There was a surprising amount of what I would call ‘wiggers’ in the classes below us, too. Not the ‘haha funny’ wiggers, but ‘I weep for our future’ types.

If there was one flaw with my class it was that, especially during its senior year (about 300 people), it was filled with pot heads. I’d guess around 75% did pot on a semi regular basis – people you wouldn’t even really expect, either (e.g. the most innocent girls, athletes, cheerleaders, etc.).

16

I had a boring and uneventful three years in high school. Me and my friends just hung out and did our stuff, and everyone else left us alone. And this was in the middle of urban Los Angeles.

Granted, it was also more than a decade ago, but I haven’t heard anything from my cousins and nieces and nephews to indicate things have changed that dramatically. And given how much our family gossips, I’m sure I’d hear if something happened…

17

I was a student of the Chicago Public Schools for thirteen years. During my time in high school, I would not have been surprised in the least to learn a beating had taken place like the one referred to in the OP. I personally witnessed two teachers physically assaulted and requiring police intervention. In my four years there, three students were shot, one killed (all by other students after school on outdoor school grounds).

Some people would find that shocking. Yet I went to one of Chicago’s better high schools. I had a wonderful experience there, and would not change schools if I had a chance to do it all over again.

18

I went to a pretty nice HS just north of Austin.
full of bullying and teasing (enough to make people suicidal and even attempt suicide): Check. I didn’t get teased too much, but that might be due to the fact that I was 5’8", usually wore a long black coat, black nails, black eyeliner, black clothes, etc (I wasn’t as freaky as it sounds, tho.). However, several of my friends were cutter/suicidal/heavily medicated.

extremely cliqueish: Ooooooooooh yes. I can think of 10 different cliques in my HS just off the top of my head.

lots of hazing: Not that I ever saw, but I wasn’t in an sports.

the vast majority of students somehow sexually active and imbibing alcoholic beverages in an irresponsible manner: Not so much in my circle of friends (we’d drink, but only occasionally, and no one ever got trashed), but on Mondays, I’d often overhear “preppy” folks talking about how they got SO Trashed Saturday night, then went to church with a hangover. Not the vast majority, tho.

with a good number of students engaging in (selling, providing, or using) illegal drugs: Yup. I had friends who would come to school high/stoned or on acid. The guy who sat in front of me did coke a few times DURING CLASS out of his backpack. It’s even worse at my sister’s school (she goes to Stoney Point HS, aka “Stoner’s Joint.”). All of her friends are stoners, her bf smokes pot, and she does on occasion (but she’s no pothead).

with lax and unconcerned faculties: I had two wonderful teachers (my Philosophy and Sociology/Psychology teachers), other than that, yeah. My grade principal (there was a main principal, then one that followed a class) got fired at my Project Graduation for being drunk.

I remember always being pissed in HS because I got my coat taken away 4 times, but their were girls with their butts and boobs hanging out of their clothing who never got spoken to. I was finally allowed to wear my coat after pointing that out. (“My clothing is distracting? I saw 5 sets of cleavage on my way here. Is that fair? No.”)

A male friend of mine almost got raped after ROTC one day, but another friend walked in and the guy ran off.

I remember a nasty fight my Senior year that resulted in bloody hand streaks on the wall and door to the men’s room.

I knew of a couple of guys who’d regularly jerk off in the bathrooms. And couples who had sex in them.

After Columbine, the campus was crawling with cops. My gf and I were walking around holding hands, and we were told that if we continued to do so, we could be arrested. WTF???!!

I have nerve damage on my left shin from being kicked with a steel-toed boot during a game of soccer. Not a common thing at all. Rare.

A gang spray-painted every mural in the art building. Destroyed them all.

A lot of teen pregnancies.

And I’m SURE there was worse going on.

An older ex-bf of mine went to HS in a bad part of . . . LA, I think (I dated him 6 years ago, I forget which city). One day when he was in class, a kid in the next aisle over pulled out a gun and shot the kid in front of him in the head.

But as for my HS experience, it really wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t traumatized or anything. I never got beaten up, I was rarely teased. The only rumor about me was that I was a lesbian, which, to be fair, wasn’t far off. But it didn’t bother me because I was known as “the hot lesbian in the trenchcoat.”

The Cody’s experiences (at a different school in the same district):

Knew of a teacher who got fired for having sex with a student.

Drugs and alcohol and cliques abound.

A LOT of bullying (he had one guy make his life hell in HS for 2 years). Wiped dog shit off his boots onto the metal rack of Cody’s desk and his backpack. Cody (Mr. Bipolar who always carries a knife) almost stabbed him for that.

Got into a fight with a kid over Now N’ Laters - punched thew kid in the head for stealing his candy and refusing to give it back.

Bloody fistfights, including between women.

Yup.

-Irish, class of `01.

19

I went to a public high school in a small city (pop. ~55,000) in Northern California. Predominantly white and well-off. I graduated in 1996. It was not really cliqueish at all, I would say. My friends were the trolls (a nickname that amuses me now), after the little dolls with brightly colored hair - most of my friends had wildly colored hair that changed every couple days. We dressed funny and did odd performance art things in the quad at lunch. We were mostly in band or drama and shunned athletics (unless it was to do something weird - two of my girlfriends were wrestling scorekeepers one year). But no one cared that I played tennis, and no one on the tennis team cared that I wore combat boots and ratty thrift store corduroys. I was in a lot of honors and AP classes that only rarely included my friends (most were either older or younger than me) and got on fine with my more preppy classmates perfectly fine. Not to the “let’s hang out after school” level, but I wasn’t an outcaste or anything.

My senior year, there was a fight on campus and it was a huge deal. I can’t remember another fight in four years.

When I was in college, though, I met people who’d had very different high school experiences, almost all also in California.

Junior high, now, THAT was a wreck.

20

I think schools have gotten worse.

I graduated in '85, and we finally pulled our children out of public school and enrolled them in private. In public schools, the classes were overcrowded. Ivyboy was once attacked in gym class, and despite there being two teachers, no one noticed that his lip was being mashed against his braces.

He was labeled a problem child, they didn’t care who started fights, they just suspended both kids. Ivyboy was assigned a country to do research on. He was assigned Slovenia. Now, considering this is a fairly new country, the school library had little information on it, so Ivyboy did most of his research from the public library and online.

He actually got in trouble at school because he was “goofing around” and not working on the assignment. Once I explained the situation (I mean, it’s not like he was studying France or Germany, for crying out loud) they understood, but Jesus Christ, it was Slovenia, a country that didn’t exist twenty years ago!

Anyhoo, three days after starting private school, he got called into the dean’s office. I was furious, until I found out that they were moving him into Honors English.

So, two years in middle school and he’s a problem child, three days after starting private school they recognize how bright he is.

Oh, and his biggest class is algebra, with 14-15 students.

The public education system is broken. It needs to be replaced.