In a recent edition of his SCHOOLED newsletter, Mike Petrilli called on U.S. high schools to stop pretending to teach foreign languages.
Who decides whether they are taught at all?
According to a 2025 analysis in Foreign Language Annals, just ten states require credit or proficiency in a foreign language for graduation: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington. Three additional states—Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia—require courses for students pursuing an advanced diploma. Using NCES data from 2024, the researchers determined that 82 percent of high schools offer world language classes, along with 61 percent of middle schools and 20 percent of elementary schools.
Students, parents, and even teachers in many states may be surprised to see that their own state is not on the lists.
The scholars’ count of official state requirements understates how many American students are required to study a foreign language in practice, since requirements often flow through district- and school-level choices. In some places, like Maryland, foreign language or career and technical education electives both fulfill the same graduation requirement; for students in a traditional high school without a CTE program, they may effectively be required to take the language courses. Massachusetts currently lacks a state mandate, but the recommended and widely used MassCore curriculum requires two years of foreign language for high school students. That may soon become official: Earlier this summer, the group tasked with revising the state’s graduation requirements released recommendations to formally align with MassCore.
And as Mike hints at in SCHOOLED, many students take on foreign language courses because highly selective colleges consider the content area as the fifth core course. If you’re a high school student aiming for an Ivy, Ivy+, flagship state school, or elite liberal arts college, you should be taking at least four years of a foreign language if offered by your high school—regardless of your state’s graduation requirements.
There are reasons why elite schools want to see evidence of this type of learning, and it’s wrong to dismiss those reasons as irrelevant for all but the highest-performing students.
Studying a foreign language in school, even under suboptimal conditions, exposes kids to cultures outside their own. It can strengthen their understanding of the English language, particularly when introduced in the younger grades, and can boost standardized test scores for older students. Plus, language classes are among the only high school courses where spoken language portions are the norm for testing. You can’t AI your way through a conversation with your Spanish teacher.
Ideally, students shouldn’t wait until middle or high school to begin studying a new language. Just five states—Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Wyoming—have world language requirements beginning in elementary school, though only New Jersey retains the requirement through high school and only Louisiana outlines specific instruction time.
But there is an unintended consequence of introducing the study of foreign language so late in most American schools: It’s a subject where kids haven’t yet been sorted by ability. Some students who struggle in other subjects discover that they have a talent for learning languages at exactly the time many kids disengage from school.
For kids coasting along until things get real in advanced high school courses, the opportunity to accelerate in foreign language courses by beginning Spanish I or French I in middle school creates a rare and valuable academic challenge. Much attention is given to acceleration through math—and rightly so—but the goal of acceleration should be to give students the opportunity for productive struggle while support systems are in place, not to simply reach an academic milestone a year or two early. How many high-achieving students find themselves suddenly stuck for the first time, frustrated, in a class where they don’t understand (literally) what the teacher is saying? Providing the opportunity to work through this friction with guardrails in place is far better than waiting until the end of high school or midway through college, when the stakes are higher and there are fewer adults on hand to help.
It is true that mediocre instruction in high school foreign language classes could be time better spent on just about anything else—especially now that technology exists to translate in real time. But then, why learn long division when calculators exist to instantly solve problems? Why learn to read the written word when we have audiobooks? Why learn to write if AI can instantly craft a reasonably good essay?
School leaders are making tough decisions about their shrinking budgets, so subjects without graduation requirements or state tests are easy targets. And in our fractured political moment, with many Americans turning inward, engaging with a new culture is perhaps the easiest target of all. The timing might be right for skeptics to cut foreign language instruction, but the answer to mediocre teaching shouldn’t be no instruction at all. Instead, let’s think harder about why so few American students are successful in their courses and put more effort into teaching foreign languages well.
