Daily News from New York, New York • 32

32 Wednesday, November 1 3, 201 3 DAILY NEWS NYDailyNews.com DAILY NEWS Mayor Bill, here's your chancellor Free speech 101 We allknowbynowthat Bill de Blasio sees education as crucial to attacking the inequality that plagues New York City and that he wants to make a dramatic turn from the test-based, top-down accountability regime of Mayor Bloomberg. No one could better make that agenda happen than Kathleen Cashin. As de Blasio mulls whom to tap as chancellor, her name ought to be atthe top of the list. I'm not a Cashin acolyte or former employee. I'm a former city schoolteacher and current CUNY professor who cares deeply about the future of the nation's largest public-education system.

And I think she would be an extraordinary leader after 12 years of Joel Klein and Dennis Walcott. Cashin, currently a New York State regent, is a 35 -year veteran teacher, principal and district superintendent in the city schools. She has shown the ability to turn around struggling schools, a commitment to bucking the current test obsession and a refreshing talentfor engaging parents. BYJESSICASIEGEL poverished parts of the city, filled with long-term failing schools. Over three years, the elementary and middle schools in her region showed the largest increases in test scores compared with similar neighborhoods.

She wasn't publicly campaigning for the job of chancellor atthe graduate center, but she outlined an agenda for the city drawn from her experience in Region 5 implement a challenging curriculum; ensure continuous professional development for teachers; infuse social and emotional learning into academics; expand art, music and other "nontested" subjects, and hire more social workers, counselors and psychologists. She questioned, as she has as a regent, the current single-minded focus on test scores a mantra of the Bloomberg administration. "Accountability is essential, but when it is in the primary position, it causes all sort of unusual and extraneous behavior," she told us, referring to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould once more has an obligation to explain what her school stands for without beating a cowardly retreat into unresponsive bleating about academic freedom. Early this year, the college played host to a lecture by a speaker whose long-term goal is to end Israel as a Jewish state and whose short-term tactics include portraying Israel as a racist regime to undermine the country's very legitimacy. A student organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, staged the lecture, with the co-sponsorship of the college's political science department.

School security improperly evicted four Jewish students, Israel supporters, from the audience. To their discredit, neither Gould nor Political Science Chair Paisley Currah offered a remotely coherent explanation for the department's role as co-sponsor. Despite repeated requests, neither produced a list of other speakers co-sponsored by the department. Such a list would have enabled New Yorkers to judge whether an academic stronghold at a publicly-funded school has an an ideological bias. Now, Currah's department is again pushing talks by anti-Israel speakers Josh Ruebner and Ben White who view the very establishment of the Jewish state as illegitimately and immorally oppressing Arabs.

And Gould and Currah can't get their stories straight about what role the college is playing and under what standards. Like all institutions of higher education, Brooklyn College must protect the rights of students to propagate their views, even those that are wildly controversial. But the college also has a duty not to play favorites with those views. After the controversy early this year, Brooklyn College drafted a manual defining what it is to co-sponsor, support and sponsor a speech. How'd that work out? Gould's office and Currrah are fighting over whether the poli-sci department is "co-sponsoring" or "supporting" this week's talks, with both sides saying the department doesn't endorse the events.

Gould's office and Currah did finally agree on the same laughable roster of previous speakers, af-termonths of requestsforit. In an email exchange with this Editorial Board, Currah said there were a "variety of speakers we have co-sponsored in the past, including pro-Israel speakers like Elliot Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, and Leonard Garment." He also said that "our department has never refused a request from a student group or an academic department to co-sponsor a talk," suggesting that poli-sci had supported a pretty full range of ideas. Pressed further, Currah revealed that Dershowitz lectured in 1974 and Garment in 1998 -which only serves to highlight how scarce the department's pro-Israel speakers have been. Abrams spoke this year. Count him a lone voice in the wilderness.

As for the full list of co-sponsorships, Currah sent what appeared to be 10 events. Five were presentations on gay, lesbian and transgender issues. The others included talks by Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, Glenn Greenwald and Abrams. There was also a Shirley Chisholm Day and an Anita Hill Conference. Here's the scorecard: three lectures by pro-Israel figures, who may or may not have talked about Israel, over nearly four decades.

Three lectures by virulently anti-Israel advocates in the space of 10 months. That is notbalance. cheating, changing grades, "credit recovery" and teaching to the test. She also rejects the whole notion of pillorying a few under-performing teachers choosing in After an impressive educational career teaching and serving as a principal in middle-class areas of Brooklyn, in 1998 Cashin took charge of Community School District 23 in Ocean Kathleen Cashin has just the right experience and skill set Cops, cuffed again Dorney of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cops lacked grounds to search because their tipster may have used a prepaid phone. Their twisted logic: Case law says anonymous tips using traceable phones can be grounds for searches, because callers would face penalties for filing false reports.

The cops in this case did not know whether the tipster's phone was traceable -and therefore should have let a possibly armed man go abouthis merry way. Dissenting Judge Richard Wesley easily punctured this reasoning: "The majority would have the government hunt down the citizen tipster who accurately reported an ongoing crime while hoping to remain anonymous, merely to secure her testimony that she knew that she could be tracked down." Madness. The NYPD's ability to combat gun violence, already under attack from a looming federal monitor and meddling local laws, has taken afresh hit from the federal courts. Late last week, an appeals panel threw out the conviction of a Bronx man because he was stopped and frisked based on anonymous tips that might repeat, might have come from an untraceable phone. The facts: Late one night in April 2011, a woman twice called 9 1 1 to report a man with a gun in a crime-ridden neighborhood of the Bronx.Offic-ers rushed to the scene and spotted a man fitting the description.

When he ignored their questions and tried to walk away, they stopped him, frisked him and found a gun in his waistband. Job well done, right? The trial judge said yes. But Judges Rosemary Pooler and Christopher stead to help all educators improve their craft. So whom is de Blasio considering for chancellor at this very early date? Two names that have been floated: Andres Alonso, the former CEO of the Baltimore public schools, and Shael Polakow-Suransky, currently the chief academic officer of New York City's schools. A problem for these possible contenders: Both worked under Bloomberg and fully bought into the metric-based notion of education, in which test scores drive almost everything.

While Cashin served during the Bloomberg years, she brought her own sense of what works from years in the trenches. It's time for someone with her skills, deep understanding and commitment to the schools to helm the New York City public schools. Siegel is assistant professor of journalism, English and education at Brooklyn College. She taught for 12 years in the New York City schools. Hill-Brownsville.

Despite initial resistance from the local school board because she was white, she won over the community. She dismissed incompetent principals, established a consistent, rigorous curriculum and got down into the classroom level, observing teachers. Test scores rose; failure factories showed hope. "We were successful in Brownsville because it was the parents, the teachers and the principals who were all pushing the same agenda," she told a CUNY Graduate Center forum that I attended earlier this year. "If we taught a writing program in the schools, the parents were taught it ata retreat." In 2003, under Bloomberg, Cashin was appointed superintendent of Region 5, encompassing 85,000 students in about 100 schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens.

These were some of the most im- Downtown is looking up At the site once known as Ground Zero, there are heartening signs of progress. Up in the air, the pinnacle of One World Trade Center has claimed its rightful place as the tallest building in the nation. Down where pedestrians walk, Greenwich St. is reemerging a half-century after it was consumed by the original WTC superblock. As the street reopens Wednesday morning, Mayor Bloomberg and the others assembled will cut the ribbon to the 978-foot 4 WTC, put up by Larry Silverstein, who held the lease on the WTC site and also built the new 7 WTC.

Half of No. 4's 2.3 million square feet of rentable space are spoken for. Its taller sibling, 1 WTC, built by the Port Authority and due to be done in afew months, is also about half-rented. The two other towers that Silverstein is responsible for, 2 WTC and 3 WTC, will rise skyward if and when market conditions and available tenants coincide. Don't hold your breath.

But do exhale, and cheer, that the promise made long ago to rebuild is being honored. DAILY NEWS Chairman Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman President CEO William D. Holiber Editor-in-Chief Colin Myler Editorial Page Editor Arthur Browne Managing Editors: Robert F. MooreNews; Teri ThompsonSports.