By Melissa Lauber
Village Life Theme Artist

Math problems, the names of perfect spellers, a list of who had perfect attendance that year, the doodles of students -- it was pretty much what you would expect to find on a school blackboard. With one exception, this particular perfectly preserved blackboard, from Millville, Mass., is 107 years old. Workers discovered it while renovating the town's municipal center.

"It's a most unique and unusual finding," said local historian Margaret Carroll. "One of the most amazing things about this is that the chalk, for some reason, has lasted for over 100 years and the writings are as clear as something written yesterday."

But many educators don't find that at all unusual. It fits American's perceptions about a golden image of public education, they say, which is rife with nostalgia and sepia-tinted memories of a time when girls' pig-tails were dipped into ink wells and chewing gum could land a student in the principal's office.

The facts, they claim, are somewhat different. Up until World War II, students did not assume that college might lie in the their futures. In fact, in the 1940's the average American attended school for only nine years and 20% attended for less than four.

But today, learning has become a state-sponsored right and requirement for all children. In the United States, more than 44 million students attend about 85,000 public school in 14,400 districts, staffed by about 2.5 million teachers at a total national cost exceeding $244 billion a year.

The goal of this massive education machine, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education reported, is to "teach all but severely disabled students to high academic standards -- to provide mastery over the complex subjects of mathematics, science, language arts, writing and history."

It's a Herculean task and America, many claim, is not making the grade.

In 1983, a report entitled "A Nation at Risk," shocked many people when it took aim at deficiencies in the U.S. public school system and reported, "if an unfriendly foreign power had imposed our schools upon us, we would have regarded it as an act of war."

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Education concluded in a report that "there is still reason for concern" and that "data on student proficiency suggest that improvements in recent years have been limited."

Then, in January 1997, the trade journal Education Week dropped a bombshell when it rated schools in the same manner that teachers rate students. American schools, it found in a mammoth study, barely receive a C grade for quality.

"Our public schools are riddled with excellence but rife with mediocrity," concluded the report, "Quality Counts."

The findings in this report, sponsored by Education Week and the Pew Charitable Trust, are based on a detailed statistical analysis of 75 categories on schools in all 50 states, and will be used as a baseline to measure future performance of the education system.

The study was broken down into four main categories: academic standards, standards and assessment, teaching quality and financing.

Among the findings: