In my experience, Canadian French classes also suffer from a bad case of the snowball effect.
The schools are so varied in what level they teach you at, some are thrown right into a french immersion program at the start of school where you either pick it up really fast or you start failing all your subjects because they're all being taught in french. Or you get cases where they simply make you watch TV for a bit,
and that french pineapple thing wasn't a joke either. Which REALLY doesn't help when said TV shows even lack subtitles, so you can't even go "Oh, so that's what they're saying", and instead have to guess with essentially just gestures. And then you get schools everywhere in between these extreme's as well.
That can get especially bad for students who need to switch schools (which in my experience, that's the majority of students case growing up) so you're constantly being thrown into classes where they're expecting you to be at a further pace than your earlier school did. And often times, they don't offer any way to help kids catch-up. Having what's essentially a "Oh well, you better smarten up and catch up" mentality... with children.
And as a Canadian, I rarely run into people who are semi-fluent in french. They are either completely fluent (for their given grade) or completely left in the dust. Which really doesn't help because with most school topics, by having students at a variety of stages you at least create some sort of mutual sympathy and understanding among classmates, where they can try to help and pick one another up. French isn't like that though, the students who would advance quickly in French tended to see the others as some sort of alien figures, which effectively created the bizarre cliché system. Like, it didn't carry much into social circles, but as far as French was concerned it effectively made a 'Master Race' and 'Poor Peasant' diversion, so the only students who would often be willing to help others would be in just as bad a situation as those who needed the help... Or in the cases the person genuinely wanted to help, there'd be such a divide they'd have no idea where or how to start.
Note this is only compounded by the fact that a lot of the time the students who are doing well are coming from french immersion programs, so they've spent several years surrounded by those whose schools and families were working non-stop on teaching them french. So the fact they now have classmates who aren't like that only add's to the foreign aspect.
All this basically ends up in the kids who do well continually progressing to do well, while the rest completely cease to learn anything from the classes eventually because there's just so much requirements to understand the content that they never ended up grasping. It was such an issue that the High School I went to let any student with an IEP of any kind skip french entirely and exchange it for learning resources instead.
I'm tempted to say given that they should just put everyone in french immersion, since it seems to have a higher success rate than otherwise.
The issue there though is that if it doesn't work (which still happens quite a bit) you've not only just failed at something in french, but just caused a set back in the kids entire education.