WASHINGTON — On a break from vacationing in California, President Clinton signed the $1 billion-per-year Goals 2000 education bill that seeks to upgrade America’s public education system by establishing national standards for academic performance.

Mary Majorowicz, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, said the state would receive about $1 million to help local school systems make plans to meet the Goals 2000 objectives.

State officials, she said, “will play a supportive, not mandating role” in helping communities move toward the goals.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, who broke a Republican filibuster early Saturday morning to win final passage of the education bill, said, “The legislation will help prepare our students to be active participants in the economy of the future.”

Mitchell, who was in Florida, was one of the key figures involved with the bill that the White House attempted to link with about 50 Washington journalists in a telephone conference call with the president.

Like the president, most of the lawmakers had returned to their home states or were on vacation for the Easter recess. The telephone linkup failed, unfortunately, leaving reporters with only background music during the live conference call. A taped version eventually was supplied.

“What this … bill does, for the first time in the entire history of the United States of America,” Clinton said, “is to set world-class education standards for what every child in every American school should know in order to win when he or she becomes an adult.”

The president signed the bill during an outdoor ceremony at an elementary school in San Diego.

Once fully in place, Clinton said, the Goals 2000 program will establish “world-class standards in reading and writing, math and science, history, geography, foreign languages, civics and economics and the arts.”

The legislation represents a dramatic shift away from Americans’ longstanding tradition of letting states and localities set their own policies and approaches to education without federal influence.

Although Goals 2000 is voluntary, the incentive of an additional $1 billion a year in federal funds is expected to draw broad participation at the local level, federal officials said.

Majorowicz, who is the Maine Department of Education’s point person on Goals 2000, said the national legislation “has evolved very much along the lines we are supporting.”

Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, was active in the early formulation of the program. So was Gov. John R. McKernan, who is chairman of the National Goals Panel. That was an outgrowth when the 1989 Education Summit of the nation’s governors convened with former President Bush in Charlottesville, Va.

America’s public schools have come under increasing scrutiny since a 1983 federal report, “A Nation at Risk,” warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” throughout the nation’s public education system.

Education Secretary Richard Riley, who participated in the California bill-signing ceremony, said the Goals 2000 program is proof that “America as a nation is getting serious about education.”

The program sets forth the objective that by the year 2000 “all students will be competent in core academic subjects” and that “the United States will be first in the world in math and science.”

It also calls for a nationwide high school graduation rate of at least 90 percent. The completion rate now is about 75 percent.

The Goals 2000 act establishes a National Education Goals Panel to assess efforts to achieve the goals, and a National Education Standards and Improvement Council and a National Skills Standards Board to establish academic and occupational standards.

Congress has allocated $100 million to develop the program and next year will be asked to approve $700 million. Each year after that, it will be asked to authorize at least $1 billion to promote and assist reform efforts.

Majorowicz said that Maine already is moving toward meeting the national educational goals and has held its own state summit on the subject.

“Many of the goals will take longer than the year 2000 to achieve. Each state will move at a different pace toward the various objectives,” Majorowicz said. “What the Goals 2000 program has really done, though, is push into action a large number of constituencies all related one way or other to education, in a shared vision and shared direction.”

Those constituencies, she said, are moving toward the Goals 2000 objectives at their own pace.

“There are a lot of ways to get there. We are not talking about a national or state curriculum,” she said.

Local groups throughout the country are meeting to establish benchmarks on what children should know in mathematics, science, language arts, history and other academic subjects. Arts goals were released earlier this year.

The legislation, for the first time, will target federal dollars to make schools safer for children, said federal education officials.