Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises

Falsified transcripts, embellished college essays, and draconian disciplinary tactics were among the shadowy practices at T.M. Landry, a college preparatory school in Louisiana once widely acclaimed for helping at-risk Black youth get into elite colleges, according to this razor-sharp investigation. New York Times journalists Benner and Green (Five Days) trace the school from its founding in 2005 by Tracey and Mike Landry to its development into a “sought after educational experience.” The school gained national recognition with its viral videos of Black students ecstatically receiving Ivy League acceptance letters. But the authors reveal T.M. Landry’s underbelly of deception, fraud, physical abuse, and cultlike control tactics such as making underperforming students “kneel in [a] circle while other children hurled criticism at them.” The school also prioritized “gaming the system,” only teaching students how to take standardized tests, which left them woefully behind academically. The authors explore how the education system laid the groundwork for the Landrys’ scam, from Louisiana’s lack of oversight for private schools—a holdover from resistance to desegregation—to U.S. colleges’ reliance on “feeder schools.” Most disconcerting is that the Landrys’ own diagnosis of the education system’s problem—“that elite white institutions wanted only broken black people”—proved accurate. It’s a damning look at the continued impact of race on educational opportunities in America. (Jan.)