4 ms·

In what ways were there "huge" differences? No cliques? No sports teams? Vastly different curricula?

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  Violence, race relations, involvement of street gangs, degree and nature of law enforcement presence and regular interaction on campus, nature and pervasiveness of drug culture, diversity of academic and extracurricular opportunities; some of these in exactly the way you'd expect based on relative wealth and demographics of the various districts, though the differences in the last went the other way, I suspect because they were controlled more by the size of both the school and the district. Some of that (most except the last and possibly the penultimate) probably would be attenuated (though still present) in the experience of middle class and higher white students.
• coldtea 7y ago
  Depending on high school there are vastly poorer students, vastly more or less immigrants, vastly more or less minorities, vastly more or less gangs, vastly more or less desolated communities, vastly more or less no-college prospects, vastly more or less resigned teachers, vastly more or less violence, and so on. On these aspects your high schools in "rural Jersey" and "Phoenix" could be more or less in the same league, the same way a Beverly Hills high school and a rich Boston area high school could be. That would not the case across high schools in general though. The only "common" part of the experience is kids being kids, boredom, bullying, puberty and so on. But that's true for high schools in Japan, Africa, or Denmark as well...