5Essentials

5Essentials is an evidence-based system designed to drive improvement in schools nationwide—it reliably measures changes in a school organization through the 5Essentials Survey and provides individualized, actionable Reports for each school. The 5Essentials system is based on more than 20 years of research by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research on five components found to be critical for school success:

• Effective Leaders: The principal works with teachers to implement a clear and strategic vision for school success.  
• Collaborative Teachers: The staff is committed to the school, receives strong professional development, and works together to improve the school.
• Involved Families: The entire school staff builds strong relationships with families and communities to support learning.
• Supportive Environment: The school is safe and orderly. Teachers have high expectations for students and support students to realize their goals. Classmates also support one another.
• Ambitious Instruction: Classes are academically demanding and engage students by emphasizing the application of knowledge.

The 5Essentials Survey is taken by all pre-Kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers and all 4th- through 12th-grade students and usually requires no more than 30 minutes to complete. The information collected through the survey is rigorously reviewed and analyzed to generate a 5Essentials Report for each school. The 5Essentials Report includes a breakdown of teacher and student responses and, most importantly, provides a comprehensive picture of the school environment based on the five Essential areas critical for school improvement in a meaningful context of similar and successful schools.

The State Board has long recognized that test scores alone do not provide a full picture of teaching and learning in any one school. Under recent legislation (Senate Bill 7, PERA), the State Board is now mandated, on a biennial basis, to implement a learning conditions survey that will finally help paint that fuller picture. While this survey may help inform state policy and improvement initiatives, it is primarily intended to help local administrators, such as teachers, principals, and superintendents, identify strengths and weaknesses at the district and school level and better target resources and interventions. Aggregated data from this anonymous survey will also be shared with parents and the general public on school report cards released in the fall.

All survey items are multiple-choice questions. There are no open-ended responses.

• The 5Essentials Student Survey asks questions about students’ experiences, attitudes, and activities in school.

• The 5Essentials Teacher Survey asks questions about a variety of topics, including instruction, professional development, and the school as a workplace.

• The parent survey supplement asks questions about the parent’s overall relationship with the school.

5Essentials Student Survey Questions
English | Spanish

UChicago Impact Supplemental Parent Survey
English

This survey provides an opportunity for students and teachers to have a voice in improving their schools. Your school community’s participation can help your school identify areas of strength and those in need of support, with fine-grained questions surfacing specific avenues for improvement. Equipped with this knowledge, school leadership— including teachers, support staff, principals, and district administrators — can be better positioned to target resources and efforts to drive school success.

• All 4th- through 12th-grade students

• All Pre-Kindergarten through 12th-grade certified teachers

• All parents (optional)

The 5Essentials Teacher Survey is to be completed by certified teachers whose primary responsibility involves teaching students for the majority of the school day and year.

Individuals in the following positions, who also teach, are among those encouraged to participate:

• Self-contained and subject-specific classroom teachers

• Instructional coaches and subject matter specialists.

• Teacher aides, paraprofessionals, and CCTs (Cooperating Classroom Teachers).

• Special education teachers working in a single classroom or across classrooms.

• Counselors, librarians, and other staff members who teach students.

The following positions are ineligible to participate in the survey:

• Substitute teachers.

• Tutors.

• Principals, Assistant Principals, Superintendents, or other administrators who do not otherwise teach students.

• Student teachers.

The parent survey will be available again this year for all participating schools. Parents can access the survey through the following platforms:

• Website
• Email/Text Message Notifications From Zion District 6

The participation threshold for the parent survey is 20%, meaning parent responses cannot be calculated for your child's school until 20% of parents complete a survey for the respective school.

The 20 percent parent response rate will be based on the total number of students at the school. Districts will then determine how and when they share their parent responses upon receipt of the completed 5Essentials Report in the summer.

The student and teacher surveys take approximately 25 minutes to complete, while the parent survey takes about 10 minutes to complete (15 minutes if the parent has a child in PK). Participants should be allotted sufficient time to finish the survey in one sitting.

SUPPORTED WEB BROWSERS

• Mozilla Firefox, v4 or newer
• Internet Explorer, v7 or newer
• Google Chrome (any version)
• Safari, v5 or newer
• Microsoft Edge (any version)

SUPPORTED DEVICES

• PC or laptop
• Smartphones
• Tablets

Parents/Students/Teachers: The survey will be conducted online and will be accessible via the Illinois 5Essentials survey site.

Parents may participate in the survey from any device with internet access. The survey is available 24 hours a day and parents can take the survey at the time most convenient for their schedule.

Students will take the survey during a designated date and class time during the school day.

Individual participation in the Illinois 5Essentials Survey is completely voluntary. However, at least 50 percent of students must complete the survey to generate a student summary report and 20 percent of parents must complete the survey to generate a parent summary report.

Please be aware that under the Protection of Pupil Rights Act. 20 U.S.C. Section 1232(c) (1) (A), you have the right to review a copy of the questions asked of your student(s). Survey questions can be found on the Illinois 5Essentials at help.5-essentials.org/customer/portal/articles/800770-illinois-5essentials-survey-questions.

A student opt-out letter will be sent home to all parents/guardians of students in grades 4-8. If you do not want your son or daughter to participate, return the bottom portion of the parent approval letter to his or her teacher.

The purpose of the survey is to help principals with their continuous school improvement, and principals already have a role in this process. The 5Essentials Survey gives teachers and students the opportunity to provide input about the school environment. These data form the basis for reliably predicting student outcomes and school improvement. Additionally, within any given school there are usually very few principals and administrators. As a result, there are not enough respondents for a principal survey to accurately and reliably measure aspects of school performance. Moreover, the small number of principal and administrator respondents for a school risks compromising confidentiality.

Nonetheless, principal and administrator perceptions are important for school improvement and school success. Interested administrators may use the 5Essentials framework for considering their own impressions of performance on each of the Essentials. Principals will have the opportunity on the State School Report Card to include information about the programs they are implementing to address the needs of their school community and the metrics they use to gauge the success of their programs.

The 5Essentials remains a confidential survey. No student or teacher names or other unique identifiers are connected with individual responses or used in any report. The 5Essentials System is designed with these protections to allow teachers, students, and parents to respond honestly to the survey to provide valuable input about their schools. If any individuals feel that they cannot respond honestly or that they are being forced to participate, they may contact the 5Essentials hotline at 5essentials@uchicago.edu or 1-866-440-1874.

In order to protect the integrity of 5Essentials response data, ISBE and the University of Chicago use preventative approaches, analysis, and data cleaning.

The rostered survey login method will already have teachers and students assigned to their appropriate schools to ensure that their responses are counting towards the correct building.

The University of Chicago has a thorough analysis and data auditing process that includes identifying surveys where responses have no variation and schools with a mismatch between the number of teachers in ISBE’s records and the number of surveys submitted.

Responses from eligible students (grades 4-8) and teachers will be reviewed and analyzed to create a web-based 5Essentials Report. In May school principals and district administrators will be given access to view the data. School reports will be available to the public via the website and Illinois State Report Card in the Fall.

Several projects were conducted last year to further improve the implementation of the Illinois 5Essentials Survey. These included a pilot in five districts to enhance survey security through use of teacher and student rosters, a review of items for statewide applicability prior to the 2014 administration, a research study to examine the use of the survey data across the state, and a research study to examine the relationship between survey results and student test score gains using data from across the state. Results of these projects will be posted to the Illinois 5Essentials website as they become available.

Please contact 5Essentials Client Services at:

773-702-3452

info@uchicagoimpact.org