Holyoke School Superintendent Eduardo Carballo is getting a raise and Holyoke Mayor Mike Sullivan isn't happy about it.
Sullivan doesn't begrudge Carballo some kind of cost of living adjustment, but he doesn't think he should get 4 percent and he doesn't think the hike should be retroactive to July, 2007.
The mayor would have given Carballo 1 percent, non-retroactive. Sullivan, who also is the chairman of the School Committee, was in the minority of a 5-3 vote in favor of the more generous increase.
I read about Holyoke's latest dustup last week in the Springfield Republican, hoping to see some new facet of Sullivan's odd relationship with the school chief. Instead, I found just one more example of why we need Barack Obama in the White House.
The Sully-Carballo show is a pedestrian political drama—just entertaining enough to watch, but hardly epic. Sullivan, in particular, is too middle-of-the-road, too interested in being popular, to do anything bold. But they're an odd couple, the erudite Carballo and Sullivan, Holyoke's favorite barkeeper.
Just a few years ago, Sullivan and Carballo seemed like a well-oiled mutual admiration machine, implementing a plan to restore neighborhood schools and lift sagging test scores. A year before that, together they'd weathered a bracing storm of criticism from state Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll, who criticized three schools across the state, including Holyoke's Peck Middle School, for not making a better effort to improve student achievement.
But over time, the relationship changed. Sullivan seemed to distance himself from Carballo. In late summer, Sullivan took issue with Carballo's attempt to hire a special education director, arguing that the hiring decision was, in fact, the School Committee's to make. Carballo, who remained poised throughout a sometimes heated school board hearing, said he didn't care who did the hiring: he had a program to run and the program needed a director.
I read the story about the pay raise controversy in the Wednesday, Oct. 15 Republican, the same day as the final debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. Ordinarily I'd have then surfed the online forums where local politics are routinely, not always fairly, sliced and diced, but I didn't this time: I was unlikely to find out what was really going on between Sullivan, who recently announced that he won't seek another term as mayor, and Carballo, the widely popular superintendent of a historically troubled school system; more to the point, the pay hike story seemed, well, so (fill in any date between 1980 and 2008).
And I, like millions of other Americans, am so looking forward to 2009.
In the age of Obama, I hope to see a cessation of the class warfare that compels nearly every mayor in every city across the land to publicly decry a 4 percent raise for a top educator. At a salary of $151,000 per year, Carballo is one of us, one of the 98 percent of Americans making less than $250,000 per year. In the age of Obama, let us hope, funding for education won't be pitted off against continued tax breaks for huge corporations and the super rich, against the staggering cost of Bush-era empire building.
In his final debate with Obama, McCain sneered at the idea of "spreading the wealth," as if our current tax policies hadn't, in fact, already spread the wealth—to the wealthy. McCain's apparent disregard for the plight of American workers following 30 years in which the gap between the rich and the rest of us grew dramatically will hopefully cost him the election. McCain apparently fails to see the economic stagnation that has resulted from his party's anti-government, anti-New Deal ethos. If Obama is successful—perish the thought if he's not—a new narrative will begin coming out of Washington, changing the political dynamic in places like Holyoke. In a future where city governments no longer must treat public workers like fiscal liabilities, how much a man like Eduardo Carballo makes will be less important than whether or not he's doing a good job."
