The story Mike Landry told about his students, who were majority African American, sounded depressingly familiar: poor, raised on the wrong side of the tracks, ignored, forgotten. But it made the rest of their story seem even more inspiring: Through grit, hard work, and help from a hole-in-the-wall private school — T.M. Landry College Prep in tiny Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — the students landed spots at Yale, Harvard, Brown, Wellesley and other elite schools.
But it wasn’t the whole story. Several of the school’s students did make it into elite colleges. However, once they enrolled, a significant number of them struggled to maintain their academic status as they realized they had inadequate skills. All they really knew was what they’d memorized through incessant ACT prep drills at T.M. Landry.
At worst, Landry’s narrative, with its lack of nuance and reliance on old stereotypes of underserved Black children in poor areas, preyed on the very communities he purported to support — resulting in many gains for himself and his wife, Tracey, but at great personal cost to the students and their families.
In their book, “Miracle Children,” two New York Times reporters — Erica L. Green, a longtime education reporter who now covers the White House, and Katie Benner, an investigative reporter — explore the duplicity of Landry’s motives and the damage he wrought.
The book opens with Alex and Ayrton Little, two exceptionally gifted brothers out of T.M. Landry who made it into Stanford and Harvard respectively. Their story is an example of how Landry used his young charges to promote his own false narrative.
The brothers were featured on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” where they were portrayed as academic phoenixes: “You were raised by a single mom,” DeGeneres said. “You were on the verge of being homeless for most of your lives.”
In truth, though the Littles were indeed raised by a single mother, and at times the family did struggle financially, they weren’t dirt-poor for most of their lives and their academic achievement wasn’t the result of a miraculous transformation at T.M. Landry. Rather, the brothers were high performers at a different, well-established private high school and had transferred to Landry about a year before.
Yet, Landry was able to manipulate the Littles’ success for his own ends: Social media videos of them reading their college acceptance emails generated millions of views, burnishing the Landry Prep brand and fueling a lucrative pipeline of new students and potential donors. It was a pattern Landry would repeat over and over. In fact, the Littles themselves had been lured to Landry Prep in part because of similar exuberant social media posts by previous students.
As a cautionary tale, with more states considering diverting taxpayer dollars to fund alternatives to traditional public schools, the story of T.M. Landry highlights troubling gaps in how education is measured and regulated, particularly at uncredentialed private academies and microschools.
In Louisiana, which has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country and where parents scramble to get their children into a limited number of well performing schools, Mike and Tracey Landry were able to operate with no oversight. They demanded complete trust in their method, deliberately kept parents in the dark about the children’s progress and persistently dodged questions, even as the school’s troubles mounted and law enforcement was closing in.
Even worse, and the crux of Benner and Green’s examination, is how the students suffered. Landry coerced students to paint themselves falsely in their college applications — downtrodden, ill-used — telling them that it was the only way elite schools would find them compelling. If they refused, Landry rewrote their essays and shamed them in front of their peers. When the colleges accepted them and promoted their success, the schools seemed complicit in the lie, further damaging the students’ well-being.
The students also carried a burden of secrets, including witnessing severe physical punishments and emotional abuse that left them traumatized. The Landrys deny that they abused children.
EdSurge spoke with Benner and Green, who first reported on T.M. Landry in 2018 and revisit many of the students’ stories in “Miracle Children.” Landry Prep alumni, as they write in their authors’ note, “believe, as do we, that they deserve to take back their stories from the Landrys and tell one that is complicated and real.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: One thing that struck me about this story is that there’s a lot of exploitation going on. There’s exploitation of stereotyped perceptions of Black children. There is the exploitation of expectations in education for different groups, of Black and white, poor and wealthy. And there is the exploitation of our culture’s unspoken rules about how the system works.
Katie Benner: That exploitation of unspoken rules that you’re describing, one of the reasons why so many of these rules are unspoken is because they’re things that society doesn’t want to admit to or to face. And we’ve seen this in all sorts of other kinds of stories of exploitation and abuse where somebody takes advantage of the fact that there are rules that we live by that we don’t want to say.
You know, American society has a lot of preconceived notions about what it means to be Black in America. And Mike [Landry] was willing to exploit them, including this idea that all Black people are damaged and that it’s that damage that makes them valuable — instead of saying if there is damage done to this community, we should fix it and stop it. It’s a fetishization of that damage.
He kept parents in the dark. He didn’t like to be questioned. If parents were not getting enough information about anything… I’m just wondering why this worked for so long?
Erica L. Green: This is something that the parents, as I’m sure you can imagine, have reflected deeply on. Even when they felt uncomfortable, even when they questioned Mike’s tactics, even when they thought he was full of it, he delivered results. They had receipts. This was a transaction that they made with him.
When the parents and families visited, when they ultimately enrolled, the ground rules were that you do not talk to your children about education. You feed them, clothe them, and I am responsible for everything else. And so for a lot of them who were uncomfortable with that, they saw this transaction that they made pay dividends on social media with videos of students getting into the most elite colleges in the country.
They saw a lot of propaganda, too, of their children solving complex math problems. And they obviously didn’t know that that was fake, but they saw to the extent that they needed to with their own eyes, what the return on investment — even the investment of deep, unfettered trust — would yield for them.
What did you learn in the course of reporting for the book that was different or surprised you since 2018?
Benner: One of the things that happened over that time frame is that the students themselves had time to process what had happened to them. I think we were both really wary of assigning meaning to another person’s experience, which is easy to do, especially if you work in a newspaper. It’s one of the things you’re asked to do — take an experience … and then to use outside voices to assign a larger meaning.
We were able to let the students themselves process what had happened and have them explain how they see their stories and what meaning they import to it.
It’s very powerful.
The students’ stories are moving. One, Raymond, was drawn to Mike Landry because he saw firsthand many of the inequities Landry had identified when he was growing up. But Raymond is eventually neglected by Landry.
Benner: Raymond is one of the stories people find so moving in the book. I think that there are things that are sad about his story, but he talks about how much he got out of that experience, how it forced him to reflect on whether or not the dreams that Mike had told him he should have were the dreams he actually wanted.
I think that that asks us all to wonder why we give specific kinds of dreams around going to certain kinds of colleges or having certain kinds of jobs.
I hope readers [wonder] too, [and] understand that dignity is not about a diploma and it’s not about a salary, that dignity is something else.
The case of Louisiana allowed for another exploitation. It is typically at the bottom of national test scores, though it showed some improvement in the National Report Card assessments last year. Would continuing to improve these scores keep other families from becoming prey to people like the Landrys?
Green: This is something that I really reflected on when we were writing this book and thinking about my K-12 coverage over more than a decade. So much rides on these test scores. And I’m not one of those people who think test scores don’t matter. We need to measure academic achievement in this country. But I recall when I was covering Baltimore, progress would just fluctuate every other release.
I don’t know if we can sit here and say that Harvard or any other Ivy is looking at NAEP scores and saying, ‘well maybe the Louisiana students are getting better, maybe we should look there more.’ That’s just not how it works. That’s what we expose in the book. That’s not how it’s ever worked. The access to these institutions does not depend on NAEP scores.
And in Louisiana, a lot of the high-performing schools are private. Which is why T.M. Landry was such an anomaly — why it was so shocking that students were leaving their very high-performing private schools to go to T.M. Landry in 11th grade and 12th grade. Because they understood that no matter how much preparation they had had throughout their educational careers in public school or private school, that what T.M. Landry was offering was … one [ACT test score] number that would get them on the radar of the most elite colleges. That was their ticket in.
He claimed that he had this network of elite-school deans who could give his students an in. The ACT score was important, but it was also about who you know.
Green: The parents say it for themselves in the book. [Mike Landry] wasn’t just selling a dream for their kids, he was selling a dream to [the parents], too. He was selling access to places that growing up in Louisiana, [they seemed] to be shut out of.
Can you talk about how the school shifted from being a sort of whole-child institution, tutoring kids from elementary school age, to one that was focused on and recruiting much older kids?
Benner: Isn’t that one of the most interesting things? You do get the sense that when they were a home school, between around 2005 and 2012, that [Mike and Tracey Landry] wanted just to tutor students and they were able to make some money off of it. And it was something that could have been a going concern in a part of the country where living expenses are lower.
But they got this taste of what it could mean both to be revered in their community and to be able to attract more students and possibly even charge higher prices when they can get a student into NYU [New York University].
That’s a very different proposition. It’s in New York City, it’s far away, it’s somewhat of a household name. And things start to change because there’s a realization that you can have more of those tangible benefits, whether it’s money or it’s renown, adoration from your community or adoration from institutions like Harvard or Yale. You start creating a different set of goals for your kids, for the students.
And it’s much easier if you’re trying to get a pipeline, to lure that pipeline from schools that have students who are in high school and doing well, than to try to take somebody who’s 4 or 5 or 6 years old and spend the next seven years of their life training them to get into Harvard. That is hard and the outcomes are unknown. Whereas meeting somebody who in their junior year seems like they could probably get into Harvard, that’s a much easier and sure business proposition.
Did T.M. Landry have elementary-age kids at the end?
Benner: They did. And that’s one of the reasons why the school begins to unravel. One of the parents [Adam Broussard] who had a student who was in high school and doing well went to T.M. Landry, and then went to an Ivy League college. [Adam] put his really young son [Colin] in T.M. Landry as well, thinking it would produce the same result.
And this is the part of the book that I think is just really beautiful: Erica [Green] wrote this part where [Broussard] gets an email from T.M. Landry, this miracle school. And he’s looking over his kid’s work and he’s like, wait a second. This isn’t the quality that I’m expecting.
And then he takes [Colin] to a Sylvan Learning Center and finds that he actually is not doing very well at all. So he starts to tell all these other parents.
Green: Once word spread that the younger ones were not performing, that’s when things really started to collapse. And it was so sad that it happened to Adam Broussard, in particular, because he was such a booster for the school. He handed over Colin when he was, like, 3 years old.
It seemed that Landry was selling a means of escape from Louisiana, from a certain way of life. But what was interesting is that at least a couple of students chose to return to their home towns because they wanted to help their communities.
Green: I think that’s actually one of the beautiful things about the book, one of the beautiful outcomes. Escape was very much imposed on them — not that they didn’t come to believe it. Mike was very, very clear that they needed to get out of Louisiana, they needed to go ‘up north,’ which is code for where white people and wealth are. They were not allowed to apply to HBCUs; they were not allowed to apply to in-state schools. So it was very much drilled into them that if they wanted a better life, they needed to get away from their own people.
There were some who did want to leave Louisiana. But as they started to come home for different reasons, whether it was financial or other circumstances, they really rediscovered their love for themselves and for their communities.
Bryson, he started a business and he has a daughter and he could not be happier. Nygel, he stayed in Louisiana after wanting to go to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. Now he’s getting his master’s to become a psychologist. As he says so beautifully, he wants to become who he needed — to extinguish the gaps that the Michael Landrys of the world fill.
