Yes. Architects who design schools also design prisons. And the designs have a lot of similarity.

In the US the school districts are primarily for containment, then for indoctrination, then for edification.

Note that this changed momentarily after Sputnik and America decided it needed to get into gear. And the current Republican push to dismantle public education systems entirely are reactionary to that, since a lot of that generation dared to question authority.

I really often wonder if school architects and prison architects are the same people

Jester Dorms on the UTexas Austin campus were famously built by the state's biggest prison contractor, by the same name.

you can hear the flourescents buzzing just looking at it

First thing I thought of. No thanks. Poor kids.

It's because we built a lot of the prisons at the same time we built a lot of the schools. They're both usually intended to serve multiple generations, and while the usage requirements may grow they don't grow so fast that you need to tear them down entirely and rebuild, usually just renovate.
They're also usually designed with more functional requirements to makes certain parts of them mandatory.
For example, schools often must have a certain amount of windowless hallway where the walls are a prescribed strength for tornado safety. Needs to be within a certain range of each classroom, have a limited amount of potential debris, and so on. As a result, every school ends up with at least one "hub" hallway that's fucking bleak as hell, because the storm shelter requirements also make it a very obvious hub to build classrooms off, and if you need to add more capacity: make the hall longer.

I've seen some designs where newer schools are being built with the shelter but as a + in the middle, with a windowed hallway around the outside, or even just taking the same floor plan and bending it to give classrooms larger window surfaces.

My town just got through a couple decades of replacing all its schools but the old buildings are still around as community centers. The new ones are much less prison like than the old ones.

Maybe a lot of it is how long we keep most school buildings