Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes and Wiley Post all figure in the history of Floyd Bennett Field, the former airport in Brooklyn where hobbyists now fly radio-controlled aircraft. The next people putting the site to work could be high school students.

As The New York Times reports, a nonprofit called Runway Green has leased seven acres there, and its founder, Geoff Roehm, says it's working with the Urban Assembly to open a public high school on the site. The broader ambition is an educational campus serving students across the city, where they could learn skills for green-economy jobs and study sustainability and flooding. There are practical questions, starting with how students will get to a site far from subway and bus lines. Runway Green plans electric buses from Brooklyn College and Kings Plaza. Once students arrive, grassland, salt marshes and tidal mud flats offer quite a bit to work with. They also suggest opportunities for teachers to watch students work through a problem, from their first observations to the conclusions they draw.

That opportunity feels especially valuable alongside a new report from Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, which describes teachers struggling to understand what students know when AI may have produced the work they submit. Some students told researchers they deliberately hold back because they're afraid their best work will be mistaken for a chatbot's. "We can't make ourselves sound too smart anymore, we cannot give our full effort anymore," said one 15-year-old high school senior. Some teachers, she said, have told students that if their work gets flagged, they won't discuss it.

That’s a miserable bargain for everyone involved. Teachers need to see how students think, and students need room to get better without improvement becoming grounds for suspicion. A school built around studying a real place could give teachers more opportunities to follow that thinking as it happens: students making observations, explaining their conclusions and revising their ideas. AI will raise questions in that kind of work, too. But there’s more for a teacher to see than a polished answer arriving at the end.

— Thomas

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