In 2007, over twice as many high schools offered courses in Advanced Placement Spanish as in Computer Science. In most schools, foreign language instruction is a graduation requirement; many of the same do not offer any courses in computer science at all.
In a society and workforce that is increasingly technology-based and with a generation of students who are more and more computer-literate, I would suggest that giving high school students the opportunity to learn a computer language might be just as important as the opportunity to learn a foreign language. The idea behind the brief instruction is the same--not to necessarily provide fluency, but almost a lesson in how to learn, how to parse information, the building blocks of a language. After a high school Spanish class, you might not remember the word for "to run," but the fact that you learned to conjugate it in Spanish probably means that you understand more about what conjugation means for your own language. Similarly, learning the basics of a programming language helps you understand how computers work--and why sometimes they don't work.
I took two years of Spanish in high school, two years of German in college, and also a year of Java programming in college. Today (after nearly a decade of disuse), I can do little more than count in Spanish and German, and would be able to program little more than a "Hello world!" display. However, I can conjugate verbs and diagram sentences in English like nobody's business--and I can easily explain the theory behind recursion or iteration or any number of programming concepts that don't require me to remember where the semicolons go.
I taught programming to first year college students, and as far as background knowledge goes, there is little difference between them and a high school senior. Especially considering that my teaching experience was seven years ago, and that is the difference between kids that grew up with the Internet and those that didn't. Having grown up in a time when computers are completely ubiquitous, today's teenagers have little need for keyboarding or typing classes, and most probably know more than their teachers about common computer applications. Learning programming is the obvious next step, and it is my prediction that in the very near future, we will see programming instruction in high school as common as foreign languages.