Teachers and education employees march on a sign reading “School” during a demonstration to protest government plans to reform the education system, in Paris, France, Tuesday, May 19, 2015. France is proposing education reforms that would end elite bilingual programs and give schools more say in how students spend their time, a move to fight the inequality in education that threatens the country’s future. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

PARIS (AP) — France is trying to shake up a top-down system of teaching, end an elite bilingual program and give schools more say in how students spend their time, saying entrenched inequality in education threatens the country’s future.

The plan from the Socialist-led government came after an international study ranked France among the developed world’s most unequal school systems, with student performance highly dependent upon their socio-economic status. The changes set to start in 2016 are relatively modest: scaling back Latin and Greek, rescheduling and expanding foreign language teaching, and letting schools — rather than the central government — decide how to spend 20 percent of students’ time.

But the plan prompted a strike on Tuesday, drawing criticism from both left-leaning teachers’ unions and French conservatives. It’s a debate that is similar to discussions about underperforming students in the United States.

Teachers unions, which routinely protest any changes, are up in arms because they complain the changes are both superficial and were pushed through without consultation. Conservatives fear an attack on France’s intellectual tradition. And the government, which has already scaled back earlier ambitions, says no one has cause to complain.

The government wants to add multi-disciplinary classes and cut a well-respected bilingual program that enrolls about 15 percent of top students in favor of expanding foreign language classes to a broader range of younger children. Students will start learning their first foreign language — usually English — in the equivalent of first grade and their second foreign language around age 12.

But French conservatives have fixed on a new required theme for middle school history classes, titled “A world dominated by Europe: Colonial empires, commercial exchanges and slave trades.” A seemingly more positive take on the period, titled “Society and culture in the Enlightenment” is an elective.

Latin and Greek will be de-emphasized — currently 20 percent of middle schoolers learn those ancient languages — but still optional. German and English will still be the first foreign languages taught — the government went out of its way to reassure worried German officials.

The number of hours in class, 26 per week, will not change.

For Peter Gumbel, a British journalist who lives in Paris and is about to publish a second book about French schooling, the plan is a timid approach to an urgent problem.

“They can’t be radical because they know if they try anything radical the whole country would erupt. As it is, they’re trying something that is not radical and the country is not quite erupting but people are going out in the streets and there’s a lot of indignation,” Gumbel said.

The unions claimed more than 50 percent of teachers participated in the strike, although the crowd that took part in a protest march was small compared to previous strikes. In an open letter to the education minister, opponents said the changes “will not be pedagogical, no matter what its promoters say, but bureaucratic.”

The last set of changes, which added a half-day to what had previously been a four-day school week in primary schools, prompted protests for a school year.

The government, citing figures from the schools, said fewer than one in four middle school teachers participated.

France’s government is under pressure to fix the system after the 2012 study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that France’s education system showed gaping disparities between rich and poor children, notably in math. Among all the 39 countries that participated in the PISA study, only Taipei showed more inequality in math results, according to the OECD.

“How can we accept that our educational system can’t promote all talents, that so many middle schoolers do not master basics, do not master foreign languages?” Prime Minister Manuel Valls wrote Monday in the Liberation newspaper. “In the current world — a globalized world, a world of exchanges — this is sending our children, and therefore our country, toward an impasse.”

The education minister at the time ultimately resigned after pushing the reform through, joining a long list of short-lived predecessors. The average tenure in the position is just 22 months and 15 days since the Fifth Republic began in 1958, according to the French magazine Le Point.

His successor, Socialist Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, has staked her tenure on the latest changes, describing critics as “pseudo-intellectuals” full of lies and nonsense.

Gumble said the changes will do little to address the fundamental problems in French education.

“The best gloss you could put on this reform is yes, they are making the program more interesting, more relevant, more fun. And that of course is shocking to the French purists who want you to be cramming things that are useless for your life,” he said.

“There is a vision of school of being a meritocratic, marvelous place where great things are learned. And the reality is that actually 20 percent of the kids are not learning anything at all.”

___

Jeff Schaeffer contributed from Paris.