I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.
My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
I feel like Americans would be better off if high school foreign language classes were replaced with cultural studies. As others are pointing out here, it’s really hard to learn and retain a language at that age in the classroom when you’re not immersed in it. But at least in my school, some of the Spanish teachers would try and do some cultural studies stuff (I even had an Argentinian teacher who brought a bombilla and maté for us to share every day, we loved that).