Lifewise Academy commissioned and paid for a study in 2023 that compared schools with Lifewise to other schools nationwide. Lifewise was in approximately 120 schools in Ohio at that time. The study claims attendance rates improve by 7% when Lifewise is offered in a school, in-school and out-of-school suspensions drop, and academic performance improves. All of these claims are easily proven wrong. Data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (ODEW) data dashboards do not show a change in attendance improvement rates for schools where Lifewise is offered, compared to other schools in the state. The in-school and out-of-school suspension data are also not a valid study, because Ohio passed legislation to end out-of-school suspensions for anything other than violent behavior. This dropped out-of-school suspensions from 39,000 in 2018 to 12,000 in 2023. The last stat Lifewise claims is that academic performance improves when Lifewise is offered. Lifewise has no data to support this, and the study says this is “hypothesized” after four years of Lifewise being offered.

Lifewise Academy used the study to attempt to prove its released-time Bible education program improves a school's attendance rate. This study was funded by Ambassador Enterprises, a private equity firm whose non-profit arm has financially supported Lifewise Academy since its inception. This study was not commissioned by a third party and was paid for by a financial partner of Lifewise. Any comment that states otherwise is a lie. Lifewise has used this lie in testimony before state legislatures, at school board meetings, in churches, and in numerous press interviews.

Multiple organizations have refuted the study itself. Honesty for Ohio Education RTRI Tool Kit (page 20)

Secular Education Association Study Rebuttal 

Its data, methods, and lack of peer review render this study invalid. Lifewise has refused to release the data they used.

To better compare schools with Lifewise to those without, high schools were removed from the calculations. Lifewise focuses almost exclusively on K-5 and middle schools. High school programs are currently rare. The three areas Lifewise discusses in the study are detailed below.

Comparing Attendance of Lifewise and Non-Lifewise Schools

I compared schools during the 2023-2024 school year with those of the previous year. There were approximately 510 schools with Lifewise and 3,021 schools without.

ODEW maintains a website with statistics to allow the public to monitor the progress of Ohio’s public schools as they work towards recovering fully from COVID. This dashboard features an absenteeism section that displays a school's student absentee rate. This information is available from 2020 to 2024 and shows satisfactory attendance percentages. Overall, Ohio public schools have seen a couple of percentage points of improvement each year since 2021.

Lifewise claims its program will immediately increase school attendance. To validate this, I checked every school that Lifewise offered a program in during 2024 and checked the attendance from the previous year to the current year. Schools where Lifewise offered its program showed a “satisfactory” attendance rate improvement of 2.15%. Schools that did not have Lifewise showed a “satisfactory” attendance rate improvement of 2.13%. There was no statistical change in the attendance rate.

When looking at overall attendance rates and chronic absentee rates, the data were very similar. The average attendance rate increased from 2023 to 2024 in schools where Lifewise was offered by 0.59%. In schools where Lifewise was not offered, the average attendance rate increased by 0.67%. The chronic absentee rate was almost exactly the same. It improved by 1.02% for Lifewise schools and 0.99% for non-Lifewise schools.

Lifewise removes students from instructional periods in 45% of the school districts it operates in, for up to an hour a week, and there is no statistical evidence to suggest that it improves attendance in any way.

Schools Offered Lifewise
Satisfactory Attendance Change:  +2.15%
Average Attendance Change: +0.55%
Chronic Absence Change: -1.03%

Schools NOT Offered Lifewise
Satisfactory Attendance Change  +2.13
Average Attendance Change: +0.67%
Chronic Absence Change: -0.99%

There is no proof that Lifewise improves attendance in any meaningful way.

More details on this topic and data files are available here.

Comparing the Behavior of Schools with Lifewise

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce (ODEW) makes discipline data available for all public schools. The comparison was done by adding the number of students who received in-school and out-of-school suspensions for each school in the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years. (2024-2025 data is not available yet) Schools that had an active Lifewise program on or before September 1, 2023, were included in the Lifewise group. Then the average change from the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years was compared. The result shows that schools without Lifewise had a drop of 4.0 fewer students suspended, compared to 0.2 fewer students for schools with Lifewise. There is no data to suggest Lifewise improves school suspensions. Lifewise claims 18 fewer students with in-school suspensions when Lifewise is available to the school. Lifewise has not made the data it used available to the public for validation, but in Ohio, it's clear that the data does not support this claim.

The data from ODEW can be found at https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/download
Select "School Building Data" and then choose the years to download the data files.
The files I used 2022-23 2023-24

More details on this topic and data files are available here.

Comparing School Performance

Every year, Ohio is required by law to release report cards for all public schools. More information on the report cards can be found here. Each school is given a performance index or score. Dozens of data points go into the score. When comparing the scores of schools with Lifewise to those without, schools with Lifewise showed a slight decrease in scores. Schools with Lifewise decreased by 0.39 points, and schools without Lifewise increased by 0.57 points. These are marginal changes, but they prove that removing students to attend Lifewise had a slightly negative impact on the schools. School years 2022-2023 and 2024-2025 were compared. Only schools that had a Lifewise program before September 1, 2024, were counted in the Lifewise group. High Schools were removed from both groups to get a better comparison.

The data from ODEW can be found at https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/download
A CSV file with the data used to calculate the scores is available here
The original data files I used 2022-23 2024-25

Conclusion

The narrative pushed by Lifewise Academy that schools with students attending Lifewise have improved attendance, behavior, and overall performance is false. The reality in Ohio, where 60% of Lifewise programs operate and are in half of the school districts, shows there is zero benefit to the schools. Lifewise uses these false stats and narratives to convince legislators, school administration, teachers, parents, and the public that Lifewise will improve their school. If you see issues with he data or have questions, please let us know.