Would granting an addictive item in exchange for perfect attendance and behavior work for troubled students?

I don’t think we need to go to Katracel-white from Star Trek, just yet?
Just entertaining an idea with out necessarily accepting it.

Incentives work for some people and not for others. My parents used them and it didn’t work very well.

Of carrots and sticks, we must be VERY careful with what types we use.
Unfortunately. Education, is largely neglected, in at least America.
It is not rewarded well, and in many cases the obscenely pricey universities leave graduates in 5–6 figure debt, with a diploma that will never be financially fruitful.
Otherwise. Education, has it’s own rewards.
If a child does not have/develope the will to do “work” in school, they are unlikely to be successful at anything.
In America, the real learning begins in higher education.

Bottom line. Like it, or not. Weather it’s even “right,” kids need to learn some form of self discipline.

In my experience, my teachers did not communicate.
Several grades, were ridiculous with the amount of homework.
Teachers of each subject just pilled it on, and the result was that no subject was actually learned fully. If you struggled with a concept in math, or science, it just had to be done, so you could do fucking English homework. Reading, and writing especially, before computers were at their current level, was very time consuming.
As I had ADHD, I had a LOT of trouble trying to pay attention to things. I was not stupid, or lazy.
I just couldn’t concentrate well.
Once I got past high-school, everything got exponentially better, as I could focus more on things I wanted to pursue.
I have essentially tried to always continue learning, since.

Learning is addictive, if it education is done correctly.

There are two ways to influence change: positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Using both seems to be the best, to me. Offering both a reward of some sort for doing what is expected and a punishment if it is not done sets the stage for all possible outcomes. The homework gets done or there is punishment. If it is done and done correctly, there is a reward. The child still gets to choose.

My daughter was the one that hated doing homework. And she was smart enough that she could pass tests without it. But that is ego since not doing the homework was dragging her from A’s to C’s. I would ask her every night if she had homework and she would tell me she didn’t. I would then find out she was lying and she just didn’t want to do it. So I started having her have the teachers sign off on a piece of paper what the homework was or if there was none. And I would spot check with the teachers. But she would conveniently “forget” a teacher or two or would “lose” the piece of paper on the way home or she would discover she didn’t have the necessary book. So I started having her carry all her books to and from school every day and we would go through each class doing homework whether she had it or not. When she rebelled against that, she started losing privileges like TV time or video games. It was more work for everyone involved for her to skip the homework rather than just doing what was asked of her. When she started doing the homework assignments again, I started praising her, doing fun things with her, etc. And the punishments would start to lighten up after it was seen that it wasn’t just a one-time thing (her doing the homework).