The Directorate of Evaluation, Forecasting and Performance (DEPP) is a department within France’s Ministry of National Education whose role is to help evaluate education policy in France. Its latest briefing note (No. 19-08, March 2019) reports on a study of changes in students’ arithmetic performance at the end of fifth grade between 1987 and 2017. The tests, conducted in 1987, 1999, 2007 and 2017, show a general decline across all groups, regardless of the head of household’s socioeconomic status or the child’s sex. And the trend seems to have grown more pronounced over the past ten years. "Thus, in 2017, more than nine out of ten students performed at or below the 1987 median, and nearly six out of ten performed below the first decile."
