PUBLIC LAW 103-227—MAR. 31, 1994 108 STAT. 235 American 17 year-olds and 20 points higher than that of Hispanic 17 year-olds. (B) Rural schools enroll a disproportionately large share of the poor and at-risk students of the United States and yet often lack the means to address effectively the needs of these children. Intensive efforts should be made to overcome the problems of geographic isolation, declining population, inadequate financial resources and other impediments to the educational success of children residing in rural areas. (C) By the year 2000, an estimated 3,400,000 school age children with limited-English proficiency will be entering the school system. The Federal Government should develop effective policies and programs to address the educational needs of this growing population of children who are at increased risk of educational failure. (D) An educational emergency exists in those urban and rural areas where there are large concentrations of children who live in poverty. The numbers of disadvantaged children will substantially increase by the year 2020, when the number of impoverished children alone will be 16,500,000, a 33 percent increase over the 12,400,000 children in poverty in 1987. (E) American Indian and Alaska Native students have high dropout, illiteracy and poverty rates, and experience cultural, linguistic, social and geographic isolation. The estimated 400,000 Indian and Alaska Native student population from over 500 Indian and Alaska Native tribes, is small and scattered throughout remote reservations and villages in 32 States, and in off-reservation rural and urban communities where Indians constitute but a small percentage of public school student bodies. To meaningfully address the special educational needs of this historically under-served population, the existing research and development system should be opened to Indian and Alaska Native people to identify needs and design ways to address such needs. (F) Minority scholars as well as institutions and groups that have been historically committed to the improvement of the education of at-risk students need to be more fully mobilized in the effort to develop a new generation of programs, models, practices, and schools capable of responding to the urgent needs of students who are educationally at-risk. (2) PURPOSE. — It shall be the purpose of the Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students to carry out a coordinated and comprehensive program of research and development to provide nonpartisan, research-based leadership to the United States as it seeks to improve educational opportunities for atrrisk students. Such program shall— (A) undertake research necessary to provide a sound basis f^om which to identify, develop, evaluate, and assist others to replicate and adapt interventions, programs, and models which promote greater achievement and educational success by at-risk students, such as—
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