Alexander Rimov
Detroit has come up with an unconventional way to tackle chronic absenteeism: pay students to show up for school.
The program, called Perfect Attendance Pays, was launched by the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) and turns attendance into a tangible financial incentive. High school students who attend every class during a five-day cycle without missing a single one can receive a $100 digital Visa gift card.
And this is not a one-off promotion. During the 2025–26 school year, students could earn up to $1,000.
$100 for Five Days
The mechanics are remarkably simple. A student must attend every class on every school day during a five-day cycle. Complete the cycle without an absence, and the student earns $100.
The reward is based on attendance, not academic performance. There are no grade requirements, extra assignments, or extracurricular obligations. The basic rule is simple: show up.
The money is not, however, handed over literally on Friday afternoon after the final bell. Payments are made later. For example, the first five-day cycle in January 2026 ran from January 5 to 9, with the corresponding payment scheduled for January 23.
And technically, this is neither a salary nor a scholarship. It is a digital Visa gift card.
All or Nothing
The rules are deliberately strict. If a student misses even one class during the five-day cycle, the $100 reward for that cycle is lost.
An excused absence does not change that. Illness, a doctor’s appointment, a dental visit or family circumstances may all be legitimate reasons to miss school, but they still mean the student has failed to meet the program’s perfect-attendance requirement.
There is one important distinction: being late does not, by itself, disqualify a student from receiving the payment. The rule concerns absences, not tardiness.
The system is therefore essentially binary: 100 percent attendance or nothing. There is no partial payment for a mostly perfect week.
Why January Through March?
The timing is not accidental. The school district deliberately concentrated the program during January, February and March, a period when attendance typically deteriorates.
After the winter break, students have to get back into their academic routines, while the winter months can be particularly difficult for maintaining regular attendance.
The money is intended as an additional incentive — a financial anchor for students who might otherwise decide that missing one more day of school doesn’t matter.
Did It Actually Work?
The first year produced some striking numbers. About 12,800 of the district’s 15,247 high school students received at least one payment — roughly 84 percent of the student population.
The district also reported that chronic absenteeism among high school students fell by roughly 10 percentage points.
But it would be premature to conclude that the cash payments alone caused the improvement. Reporting and analysis of the program have pointed to an important limitation: the financial incentive appears to work particularly well for students whose attendance was already relatively strong. The hardest cases — students with severe, chronic absenteeism — have proved much more difficult to bring back into the classroom.
In other words, $100 may be enough to persuade a teenager not to miss another day. But money alone cannot solve every reason a child stops going to school.
The Program Is Expanding
Detroit has nevertheless decided not to abandon the experiment. Quite the opposite: it is expanding it.
In the 2026–27 school year, the financial incentive is being extended beyond high school to students in grades 6–8. They can earn $50 for each five-day cycle of perfect attendance.
High school students remain eligible for $100 per cycle, with the possibility of earning up to $1,000 over ten cycles.
In other words, the older the student, the more the school district is prepared to pay for a perfect attendance record.
Bribe or Rational Incentive?
Critics of programs like this inevitably ask the same question: does paying children to attend school turn education into a transaction in which students have to be bribed simply to show up?
Supporters take a more pragmatic view. If the traditional methods — calls to parents, meetings with counselors, warnings and persuasion — are not producing the desired results, why not try a material incentive?
Adults, after all, make countless decisions based on financial incentives. Detroit is offering teenagers a particularly simple contract: Show up for school, and get paid.
And that is what makes the experiment interesting. The real question is not whether $100 is enough to make a teenager happier about going to school. It is whether a system designed around financial incentives can succeed where conventional appeals to responsibility, discipline and the value of education have failed.
Detroit has decided to test that proposition not with another policy paper, but with actual money.
And after the first year, the district has decided to bet even more.
Robert Reich
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