Using RESI to find your school's Lowest Third

Using RESI to find your school’s Lowest Third

The Progress Report measures the percent of students in your school’s lowest third who made at least one year’s progress. The RESI does not have a flag for this, and the Progress Report back up data indicates who was in the lowest third the year before so avoid using that flag this year since many of those students will no longer be in the lowest third. Therefore, if you are interested in locating these students, here is the way to do it.

The Progress Report identifies students in the school’s lowest third by using the Proficiency Rate, not the scale score. To identify your school’s lowest third, apply the autofilter to the first row (click on the far left margin of Row 1 to highlight it, then select data-filter-autofilter from the menu). Go to the column with the 2008 ELA Proficiency Rate (RD PR08), click on the caret and select (Top 10)

Then change the options from “Top” to “Bottom”, “10” to “33” and “Items” to “Percent”.

You’ll then get the lowest third for your school. Insert a new column called “Lowest third ELA” and enter a “y” in all the visible cells in that column.

Now you know who is in your school’s lowest third.

Having the lowest third students flagged will allow you to disaggregate the data using pivot tables to see how these students break down by grade, by gender, ethnicity, special education status or LEP status. If you have trouble creating pivot tables, check out the other documents in the Excel Self Help folder and the youtube videos.

You can convey this information in raw numbers or percents. In Network 14, we see that we currently have relatively more students in the lowest third in Grades 6 and 8 (based on Grade 5 and Grade 7 scores). Note that the percent is not exactly 33% because students who were not tested are included in the “no” category.

Lowest third ELA
GRL / yes / no / Grand Total
04 / 598 / 1180 / 1778
05 / 578 / 1019 / 1597
06 / 567 / 1503 / 2070
07 / 518 / 1157 / 1675
08 / 500 / 1270 / 1770
Total / 2761 / 6129 / 8890
Lowest third ELA
GRL / yes / no / Grand Total
04 / 34% / 66% / 100%
05 / 36% / 64% / 100%
06 / 27% / 73% / 100%
07 / 31% / 69% / 100%
08 / 28% / 72% / 100%
Total / 31% / 69% / 100%

Attendance, disaggregated by lowest third: Here is a table with some counterintuitive findings. We wondered whether students in the lowest third had lower attendance, but discovered that students in the lowest third actually had higher attendance!

Avg. ATT PCT07-08
GRL / Lowest third ELA / Total
04 / Yes / 92.3
(blank) / 87.5
04 Total / 89.1
05 / Yes / 91.9
(blank) / 88.1
05 Total / 89.5
06 / Yes / 91.3
(blank) / 89.2
06 Total / 89.8
07 / Yes / 89.7
(blank) / 87.2
07 Total / 87.9
08 / Yes / 88.9
(blank) / 87.1
08 Total / 87.6
Grand Total / 88.8


LEP Status: We also wondered whether LEP students were more likely to be in the lowest third. Indeed, greater percents of current ELLs (Y) are in the lowest third. However, there are higher percents of monolingual students (blank) in the lowest third than former ELLs (P, meaning they have passed the NYSESLAT).

Count of ID / Lowest third ELA
GRL / LEP / yes / no / Grand Total
04 / P / 17% / 83% / 100%
Y / 60% / 40% / 100%
(blank) / 29% / 71% / 100%
04 Total / 36% / 64% / 100%
05 / P / 19% / 81% / 100%
Y / 65% / 35% / 100%
(blank) / 32% / 68% / 100%
05 Total / 38% / 62% / 100%
06 / P / 16% / 84% / 100%
Y / 53% / 47% / 100%
(blank) / 25% / 75% / 100%
06 Total / 29% / 71% / 100%
07 / P / 18% / 82% / 100%
Y / 64% / 36% / 100%
(blank) / 28% / 72% / 100%
07 Total / 33% / 67% / 100%
08 / P / 18% / 82% / 100%
Y / 57% / 43% / 100%
(blank) / 26% / 74% / 100%
08 Total / 30% / 70% / 100%
Grand Total / 33% / 67% / 100%

Dabulug Page 4 November 10, 2008