There's actually a divide by North/West versus South between the way public school systems are organized.Booknerd wrote: ↑May 24th, 2020, 6:55 pm Just curious, are other states' powerhouses mostly from suburban areas of the big cities in the state? Like in Illinois teams from towns outside of Chicago tend to do much better than ChiPubSchools, even though ChiPubSchools makes up almost a quarter of the total number of students in Illinois. *cough cough* suburb kids you're too good for us city kids
So are other states also dominated by suburban areas? Or does the big city dominate?
In the South, it's fairly common to see public school systems cover an entire county, while in the North and West, public school systems are more often fragmented: they serve only a town, a suburb, or some other specific subpopulation. For example, Indianapolis Public Schools is one of the most high-attention high-visibility districts within the city of Indianapolis, yet despite its name, it ironically serves a minority of the students in the city. This is because students in the Warren Township suburb of the city go to one school district, the Washington Township suburb goes to another district, and so forth, until only a minority of students in the city attend each district.
Not only does the South tend to have larger, broader districts, the South also saw itself targeted in many desegregation orders in the 1950s and 1960s. Following demands of civil rights activists backed by federal courts, school districts in the South started to send students across town borders, and even merged small districts into larger ones. Consequently, suburban students suddenly found themselves going to school in the city, and city students suddenly found themselves going to school in the suburbs. Although courts ordered a handful of Northern school districts to desegregate as well, the flurry of desegregation fell most heavily on the South because, hey, that's where Jim Crow laws were, so why desegregate the North?
In a classic example of Reverse Uno, some Southerners became proud of their integrated schools, and resisted attempts to resegregate schools, while the North and West grew steadily more segregated as few people paid attention to the former anti-confederacy states. So, while wealth flows from the suburbs into urban schools in the New South,* it's much rarer in the North and West. (*Of course, it's not all milk and honey in the South. Some Southern districts even suck at providing education to their affluent or white students. So, the New South usually refers to states that are doing better than others, which usually includes at least Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.) This is why many successful Southern public high schools are located in huge, county-wide districts, namely Enloe (in a district of 28 other high schools), TJHSST (21), Brookwood (21), Boca (23), North Meck (31), and many more. Heck, Enloe is just a short walk away from downtown Raleigh. Meanwhile, powerful teams in the North are frequently the only high school in their district, like New Trier, Adlai E. Stevenson, Carmel, Munster, Lake Central, Solon, Centerville, Acton-Boxborough, Northville, Syosset, Fayetteville-Manlius, Columbia, and plenty of others. These schools cater to suburbs rather than being one of many schools serving large urban areas.
That said, because suburban students attend urban districts in the South, what happens is that successful teams are mostly comprised of suburban students anyways. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
