Here is another viewpoint for those who love free markets in education.  Those districts that have better working conditions and better pay for Front Range teachers attract better (i.e. more credentialed and more experienced) teachers than districts that do not offer these advantages.  All of the Colorado districts that have these positive features also have unions.  Since teachers will migrate in droves to settings with better conditions (see the case of Douglas County), the better school districts set the price for all the districts.  Teacher pay is improved from even SOME of the school districts having unions.  Douglas County School District has put itself in the hole by hundreds of million of dollars in teacher salaries that it will have to pony up from local funds in order to restore the district to functionality.  And it did much of this so that it could stop negotiating with a pretty mild teachers' association.  That was a steep price to pay for ideology.