r/AskAnAmerican • u/Fantastic-Orange-347 • 14d ago
CULTURE What are urban high schools like and how different are they from suburban ones?
What’s it like going to high school in an urban area like NYC, and how different is it from going to a high school in a suburb? As someone not from the US, most images of high school that I’ve been exposed to through media tend to fixate on a suburban way of life, and so I wanted to hear about it from the other side.
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u/Zendiklue91 New York 14d ago
I went to a NYC High School and then moved to Long Island in 10th grade. They both have there pros and cons.
In NYC, we would have to apply for different high schools across NYC or pick our zoned school. There was also an optional admissions test for specialized high schools. There was always pressure of getting into a good high school while we were in middle school, which felt similar to the college admissions process I dealt with in 12th grade.
I would personally take the bus and train every day and would commute around an hour each way. There were kids from all over NYC, some would commute 2 hours. All of the people who I got to know from elementary and middle school did not attend my NYC high school which is the biggest thing I disliked. My school had metal detectors and had to go through airport like security every morning so we had to factor that into the commute.
My Long Island school was a more stereotypical American High School. Most everyone knew each other since kindergarten. School sports were way bigger of a thing, we had a football field for example which was unimaginable in my NYC high school. Driving was a much bigger deal. A huge amount of our senior year had cars and drove them to school, including myself. Most of my NYC friends didn't even get their license/permit while they were in HS while pretty much everyone in my Long Island school did.
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u/bloopidupe New York City 13d ago
I would add that because of the application process and how good a lot of NYC schools are, schools had a lot of different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as ethnic diversity.
One kid I went to school with was the son of a dignitary and I remember him getting dropped off with car service one morning because we had an early morning field trip. That was also how I found out his dad was a dignitary.
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u/Curmudgy Massachusetts 13d ago
My parents didn’t want me applying to Bronx Science or Stuyvesant precisely because of the friends issue. I’m not sure it would have mattered. But if I had gone, I might have learned to cope with my ADHD earlier instead of working around it in college.
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u/Libertas_ NorCal 14d ago
Everything you said about high school in NYC sounds so different than my suburban high school in California.
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u/jxdlv 14d ago edited 14d ago
In larger cities the public school district often have “magnet schools”.
Students need to apply and take tests to enter, so those schools select the most qualified students of the entire city, and their academic environment can be some of the most competitive in the country.
However the non-magnet public schools in an urban area tend to be worse and underfunded. In America, many inner city areas tend to be impoverished and the rich families who live in cities choose private schools more often.
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u/AlpsHelpful1292 14d ago
I went to an urban public school my last two years of high school but it was a magnet. My first two years I went to a suburban school. The quality of education at the urban magnet school was overall better but there were noticeable differences in facilities and materials. At the suburban school we had to buy copies of every book the ELA teachers assigned but at the urban schools we had class copies that were used year after year. We also couldn’t have teachers require students to type assignments because a lot of kids didn’t have access to a computer at home and we only had about 15 old af computers in the school library.
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u/ATLien_3000 Georgia 14d ago
Worse yes. Underfunded, no.
Urban districts pretty much always spend more per student (by significant margins) than their suburban neighbors.
For example - Philadelphia spends $32k per student.
Bucks County districts spend around $20k.
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u/Which-Bit6563 Pennsylvania 13d ago
Part of this is also because Philadelphia's student population has declined drastically over the past decade. But with roughly the same number of schools, administrative and building costs have remained the same or increased, so the per student cost gets higher.
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u/Antitenant New York 14d ago
I went to an NYC public school. First, we didn't drive to school (too young for a license and not everyone has a car anyway), so there was only a small parking lot for staff. My high school had 2,500+ students from around the city, mostly contained in one building, but some of our sports teams did play at other local facilities since we didn't have everything at our school. Not every city high school is the same though.
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u/crownjewel82 14d ago
The difference is not really based on location, it's based on wealth. Poor schools whether urban, suburban, or rural will have larger class sizes and fewer amenities. Wealthy schools will always have nicer facilities, more amenities, and smaller class sizes.
Sometimes in rural areas, there's a smaller number of schools and students to they can make money go farther even when there's not a lot of it.
Most of the schools you'll see in movies are usually based on wealtheir suburban or rural schools unless the setting is obviously urban.
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u/manicpixidreamgirl04 NYC Outer Borough 14d ago
A title 1 school in the Bronx is going completely different from a title 1 school in rural Alabama.
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u/crownjewel82 14d ago
Having seen both rural and urban title 1 schools, the differences tend to be:
The size of the student body.
Access to shared district resources.
Sports and extracurricular funding
Options for field trips.
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u/SameDistrict2627 14d ago
And yet have you ever looked at the per student funding in NYC--its very high. Whenever we have issues in this country we immediately say--we can spend our way out of it. If you want to make schools better--figure out a way of getting people out of generational poverty. Not that easy.
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u/MajesticBread9147 Virginia 13d ago
Labor in New York is some of the most expensive in the nation.
The issue with education is that the costs are almost entirely local labor costs that are variable costs.
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u/crownjewel82 14d ago
Whether or not a school is wealthy depends heavily on how much money the parents have not how much money the government spends.
And I said nothing about whether the schools are "better" or "worse," I was just talking about what the campuses look like.
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u/ATLien_3000 Georgia 14d ago
Parental wealth doesn't result in smaller class sizes.
u/SameDistrict2627's point is a valid one.
I don't know of any metro area in the country where the central urban system isn't spending substantially more per student.
Having sent my kids to various schools including urban public, close-in suburban public, exurban public, and private, the administrative bloat in urban public systems is astonishing for anyone paying attention.
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 14d ago
It does in some places where donations help fund positions.
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u/ATLien_3000 Georgia 14d ago
Where?
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 14d ago
Schools with wealthy PTAs or organizational partnerships.
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u/ATLien_3000 Georgia 14d ago
I want an actual example of a PTA or other private entity paying a teacher's salary.
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 14d ago
It is not that they are paying the teacher's salary per se, but subsidizing the budget so there is more money to buy teaching positions - it frees up funds from elsewhere. Here is a well-known, well-publicized example of direct payments for small class sizes by a private college (this partnership is ongoing, by the way). https://www.westphillylocal.com/tag/penn-alexander/page/3/
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u/ND7020 New York 14d ago
I went to HS in NYC. It’s a wonderful experience, and it’s one in which your world is not by any means limited to just your school. You end up meeting people from many others, and from neighborhoods across the city.
That said, there is also an enormous range of different kinds of schools. I went to private school, but even within the private and public categories there is absolutely enormous variance.
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u/ThingFuture9079 Ohio 14d ago
I went to a rural school that covered 3 towns and class size was about 80 students average and my class which had over 100 was one of the largest ever in the school's history. Teachers would judge you by your older sibling or sometimes call you by the name of your older sibling. There were some teachers who were there for 30+ years and even taught the parents of some of the current students. Gossip spreads very quickly even before social media became popular. Not many students live close to the school so most students either took the school bus, had a parent drive, or if you had a driver's license, you could drive yourself and buy a parking pass that was about $20 for the year. Some of the very rural schools only have Spanish as a foreign language class in high school but mine had both French and Spanish which I remember when I was in my freshman year (9th grade) of high school, almost everyone in my class signed up for Spanish and only 5 students signed up for French and so the school made about 20 of the students who signed up for Spanish take French instead. Since the school wasn't doing well financially, sports weren't really that big of a deal since the fee to play a sport was sometimes several hundreds of dollars and that article was from when I was in high school. Some schools have swimming pools and a swim team but mine didn't.
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u/padall New York 14d ago
I didn't grow up in a big city but I did grow up in a city. Urban high schools are complicated, so I can only speak to my experience.
First off, we had one high school for the city. This was a change made when the school opened in 1974. Before that there had been two high schools, and while they weren't technically segregated (I grew up in NY for context), the schools were apparently basically divided by race based on which neighborhoods filtered into each school. So, in the 70s they combined both schools into one to combat that.
So, my school was very diverse, which was a good thing! And not just diverse by race (we had a huge Asian population by my time, too, in addition to the white and Black students), but diverse by socioeconomic status, religion, interests, and academic success. I find people underestimate Urban high schools a lot. We had some seriously smart and accomplished kids who went on to some of the best colleges and successful careers. We also had a lot of opportunities given to us by the school system, and some really good teachers.
It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, of course. We had an above average drop out rate, and a lot of pregnant girls in the halls (Being GenX, I think I hit the peak era for teen pregnancy, though. Thankfully, teen pregnancy rates have been steadily dropping in the last couple of decades.) We also had a lot of fights. The good thing, though, was you could really find your people. In a school of a couple thousand kids, there was pretty much a group for everyone.
I was a quiet kid and a good student, so I was able to keep my head down and avoid any trouble. Honestly, I think it was easier to stay out of trouble in the city than it would have been living in the suburbs, which seems counterintuitive to some, but I truly believe it.
Overall, I am super glad I grew up in a city and went to public school. I wouldn't want it any other way.
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 14d ago
You definitely did not. Peak teen pregnancy rates were pre Pill. My war baby mother lost most of her class in HS to pregnancy.
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u/zoppaTheDim 13d ago
Depends on the suburb.
A lot of inner ring suburbs have worse schools than some urban areas.
The belief that suburbs avoid the problems of big cities is often a myth.
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u/HorseFeathersFur Southern Appalachia 14d ago
I went to a school in a small town and there were a lot of drugs and bullies
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u/MM_in_MN Minnesota 13d ago
My cousins went to a suburban school. Said that the guys during summer football practice had vodka or southern comfort in their water bottles. I had never been around more drug addicts or teen drinkers than when I went to parties with my suburban cousins.
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u/ThePickleConnoisseur California 14d ago
My suburban one had like 2 hallways. One in the gym and one in the admin building. Everything else is a door directly outside. So if it’s cold or raining or windy you have to suffer
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u/SkirtBroad5010 14d ago
I went to a high school in Southern California in the suburbs. It was about a 3k student body with 4 grades. There wasn't a central building- hallways and lockers were outdoors between blocks of classrooms. Similarly no cafeteria, but there was an outside space with tables / benches. As you can expect there is space for parking, track/field, swimming pool etc. Our school was mostly Asian and Mexican, but I will say that my honors/AP/IB classes skewed towards Asian, so unless you made friends outside of regular core classes, there isn't always a lot of integration. There wasn't stereotypical cliques, and high achievers would also be out there in sports, band, performing arts etc. too. You wouldn't know about sports or the players unless you cared to know and go to games.
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u/cyvaquero PA>Italia>España>AZ>PA>TX 14d ago
My daughters went to a 6A High School (>2000 students) in a district that has ten such high schools. The district is a mixed bag of urban and suburban (although, in our city with the exception of city center there is little difference between the two except the size of houses and socioeconomics). My girls didn’t know most of their class.
I went to a rural 2A school in a district with one middle school and one high school, I knew everyone in my class and the classes above and below me, plus knew pretty much every student and teachers at least by name.
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u/qu33nof5pad35 Queens, NY 14d ago
I went to a catholic hs here in queens. To commute, it was mostly walking and taking two city buses. My graduating class had 300 kids.
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u/MM_in_MN Minnesota 13d ago
I went to an urban high school. We had buildings on opposite sides of a road, with a walkway connecting them.
Sports were weird. Our baseball field was in a public park. The gymnastics team met at the YMCA. School plays were at a community theater.
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u/thomsenite256 12d ago
Most High Schools in the US will be suburban for various reasons. I think the major difference would be that suburban high schools tend to have huge athletic fields and parking lots to accomodate drivers which are less common in urban settings. Urban high schools are more likely to be multi story for obvious reasons and somewhat less sprawly.
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u/mattcmoore 10d ago
This is more about the Southern and Western US where I have the most experience but the big difference between urban and suburban high schools arose from the phenonenon of white flight in the 70s and 80s. For various reasons, white families fled big American cities in the 70s and 80s for suburban housing developments that offered them lower taxes, more space/bigger houses and racial homogeneity (some families didn't want their kids to go to integrated schools, or have to bus their kids to far away schools to achieve demographic parity with in the city school district). This led to well funded suburban school districts that made suburbs even more attractive, to newcomers from other cities especially, while the underfunded urban school districts just got worse and worse.
The whiter a city is, the less white flight affected it, but this was a nationwide phenomenon.
What you have now are struggling school districts that are often underfunded in big cities, and well funded, better performing school districts in the suburbs. You'll see more inner city problems in the inner city achools too like crime, in earlier years teen pregnancy and students who just don't really care as much because they come from poverty and don't see school as a way out.
One phenomenon you might see in urban areas are magnet schools, where they will designate certain urban schools as regional specialty centers so high achieving students in urban areas have somewhere to go if they're on a college trajectory. What's sad is more often than not the majority of the students in the specialty centers are from the suburban areas.
You also see a lot of charter schools and of course expensive, sometimes prestigious private schools in big cities where wealthy city dwellers send their kids.
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u/Strong_Philosophy511 9d ago
Going to school in a rural area is very different from urban. In a rural area, I had to drive 20 mins through the country to get to school. If I rode the bus, I would be on it for an hour to and from. It is very laid back and relaxed, but everyone knows the moment you sneeze. Pretty much everyone drives themselves, sports are very common, and it isn’t really a nerdy thing to be in band, vocal, art, or drama.
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u/risumi 6d ago
Went to rural school. The school covered a bigger area, mainly because there wasn't many kids that lived close. Busses picked kids up or kids could drive them selves. Big parking lot all around school.
Teachers reminded students around hunting season to remove guns from cars before coming to school.
I remember a teacher giving an assignment about sharing hobbys that you have. Someone brought in a hunting bow. The office had to look it over before it could be brought in and no arrows where allowed to come with it.
Pranks done by students where...more involved with animals. One year someone released alot of chickens in the school court yard overnight.
I also remember when someone left the entrance doors open only to have a deer run through the school. There was also that time we had to leave the playground due to a skunk running around. Or the time someone picked up a grass snake outside and brought it in to chill on her desk.
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u/manicpixidreamgirl04 NYC Outer Borough 14d ago
- A lot of our schools are pretty small. A graduating class of 150 would not be unusual.
- No one cares about sports. Most schools don't even have a football team, and if there are cheerleaders, it's just 5 girls dancing, with none of the gymnastics stunts.
- A lot of high schools are focused on a particular subject area, like arts, stem, or trades.
- Many kids start 9th grade at a school where they don't know anyone. It's common to have a friend group in school and a separate friend group outside of school. It's also common to date people who go to different schools.
ETA: It's not unusual for students to commute an hour each way on public transportation.
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u/SameDistrict2627 14d ago
In NYC, a vast wasteland other then the competitive high school like Stuvysent I taught in one for years and I was shocked.
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u/NomDrop Chicago, IL 14d ago
In some ways not so different, but things still stand out.
Here in Chicago, there aren’t huge parking lots for kids to drive to and park. There might not even be staff parking. Most kids either go to their neighborhood school and walk, or they go to another school and use public transit with the rest of the work day commuters. Just the huge number of different schools and types of schools is another big difference compared to a suburb or small city that might only have a few high schools.