What do you mean by "push"? In my daughter's HS, they offer Spanish, German, Chinese, French and Latin, but no one is pushed to take one language over any other. I personally pushed my daughter to take Spanish because it's clearly the most useful second language available. When I was in HS, I took French and German and I regretted it ever since. So much so that I'm enrolling for the fall semester in a beginning Spanish class!

I'm editing to add Obama's complete statement, since it hasn't exactly been reported fairly by some news outlets.

“I don’t understand when people are going about worrying about “we need to have English only. They want to pass a law, “We want English only”. Now I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this! Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish! You should be thinking about how your child can become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. Y’all it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German, and then we go over to Europe and all we can say is Merci Beaucoup. Right?”