Like, are there jocks and cheerleaders walking round hallways in full gear? Do you attend big rallys when the school football team are having their big game? Etc
Athletes (particularly football/basketball/volleyball) and cheerleaders are typically the popular kids, particularly if they like to party, and sports is the dominant focus. Academic pursuits are a sideshow, even to some teachers.
Pep rallies are only for whenever a sports team makes it unusually far into the postseason, not for just any "big game". My school was known for the "curse of the pep rally" where any team that got a pep rally would lose the next game, and that got so bad that they stopped having them at one point.
Bullying and cliques are still big problems, and because the people who become teachers tend to be people who liked school as students, teachers are pretty ambivalent toward them.
The "Super Bowl" of American high school is the big standardized test that you take as a junior, usually near the end of the spring semester. Depending on what state you live in, it is either the American College Test (ACT) or the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). In many states, teacher pay and school funding has to do with how well kids do on these tests (in addition to them having a huge effect on where an individual student will get accepted into college and how much financial aid he will receive), so teachers and schools push those tests hard, with preparation sessions during the school day in the weeks leading up to the test being very common.
Full disclosure: I went to a public high school in Illinois. I also taught and substitute taught at one before becoming an actuary.
