What does your school do to incentivize getting good grades? Many students in our district want to “just pass” if they even try for that level.

Until good grades become an achievement worth getting for our students, incentives won’t make the sweeping change we hope for. Even if your grades are poor, you can go on to college or trade school or the military. There are no real consequences for poor grades, so why put in the effort?

So, our school system used to give friendly "40%" if you had below this and then they would let you do credit recovery classes for any core subject. Students would then get friendly 40's for the first two, 6 weeks and then "try" some and pass the final and squeak out their 60% to pass the class. Thankfully they have now taken that away, but they also now do not count absences.
However, we can take off late points and if unexcused we do not have to let them make up missing work. With the students in our high school one thing that has been a tremendous change is getting rid of the cellphone. I have so many students now trying to get better grades. As a school system WE cannot incentivize the students to get better grades. It has to be accountability from parents or guardians at home, not us.
The better question is "how do we get?' parents to get more involved. Because what I see is the involved great parents the students are passing and excelling but the other permissive parents the students could care less and blame us as teachers and a school.

I have mixed feelings about that kind of thing. I guess for some students it might work, but for most of the kids I encounter they'd see an incentive structure or gamification as just another corny thing they want no part of. I try to make it clear that doing the reading and understanding the material will just make them better people. So it's a very general incentive, but it seems to work, at least with most students.

We have a fun card. Depending on grades, you’ll get X amount of rows. Prizes are getting an extra few points on an assignment, an extra day on an assignment, eating lunch outside with a friend, things like that. Normal incentives, but even that will only go so far if a student is having other issues.

We do not have anything in place about motivating students toward academic achievement. The focus seems to be on behavior and character development- kindness, respect, etc. we have a school-wide reinforcement program of sorts with common language and reward stickers for positive behavior.
I have not seen an emphasis on good grades in YEARS. It seems like the kids have learned that they are arbitrary numbers and the efforts aren’t worth it. Parents don’t seem to care and there is much more support for excellence in sports than in academics.

We are a small school so we've done a couple of things like fieldtrips and raffle tickets.

Work with the students where they are.