Detroit Public Schools is expanding a taxpayer-funded attendance program that pays students for completing full weeks of class. High school students can receive $100 per week and collect up to $1,000 in Visa gift cards during the school year. The district is now extending the program to students in grades six through eight, who can earn $50 for each week of perfect attendance.

The Perfect Attendance Pays initiative began in 2024 and returned for the 2025–2026 school year. District leaders created it to address chronic absenteeism, which remains a major problem across Detroit schools. During the 2024–2025 school year, 61% of district students missed at least 10% of their classes.

District officials contend that regular attendance is closely tied to academic success, with the belief that students who miss 18 or fewer days per year are three to five times more likely to perform at grade level or be prepared for college. The payments, however, are based only on attendance. Students do not have to meet any GPA, test score, or academic improvement requirement.

Detroit is testing whether cash can succeed where attendance warnings, truancy enforcement, and family outreach have repeatedly fallen short. Chronic absence is not simply a scheduling problem since students who miss class lose instructional time, fall behind peers, and become more likely to leave school without graduating. Getting them into classrooms could improve academic outcomes even though the reward requires no improvement in grades.

The program does raise some questions regarding how schools should use limited funds. While incentivizing students with money could increase attendance, it also diverts money away from other services the school offers, such as tutoring and transportation. Additionally, it does not guarantee academic success or address the underlying issues that keep children home in the first place. Illness, unstable housing, unsafe commutes, and family responsibilities cannot be solved with a gift card.

Should attendance and achievement improve and justify the expense, incentives may expand and spread to other districts. However, if students return only while payments continue or their performance remains unchanged, the program could become an expensive lesson in rewarding attendance without fixing the conditions that made absenteeism common.

Perfect-attendance rules can create complications. A student who misses one day because of illness, an appointment, or an emergency may lose the week’s payment. This could indirectly incentivize parents to send their children to school, even when they maybe shouldn’t.

Detroit is testing whether schools can solve a breakdown in discipline and parental responsibility by attaching a cash reward to the most basic part of education. It’s certainly thinking outside the box, and other districts may follow if the weekly numbers improve, even without better grades. However, that could leave taxpayers funding a growing incentive system while the deeper reasons thousands of children stopped showing up remain untouched.