There has been no shortage of post-mortems for Florida's now defunct STAR merit pay initiative, but states and districts venturing into these waters should heed the latest "what not to do" lesson out of Martin County.

The district doesn't hide the fact that that it really didn't want to participate, and only did so because, if it opted out of STAR, it would have had to pony up its own funds for an alternative. Under STAR, the district developed its own tests to gauge teacher performance for the significant number of grades and subjects not evaluated by state assessments. No one seems to be standing up for the quality of these quickly-developed tests, but that aside, here's the choice the district made that ensured the whole thing would crash and burn: students weren't graded on the tests, and they knew it.

It isn't clear whether students knew the tests would be used to evaluate their teachers (and whether that would have been a positive or negative motivator is an open question), but they certainly knew it didn't make any difference to their GPAs. Not surprisingly, there is no end of dissatisfaction with which teachers got performance awards and which teachers didn't.

The district says it won't use this same approach this year under their new MAP bonus plan. But we're sure there are plenty of bad ideas still out there to try.