The Lie That Elite Colleges, and a Nation, Wanted to Believe

“Miracle Children” details how a Louisiana school exploited the demand for stories of Black trauma.

By Kevin Carey

Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

Published Jan. 13, 2026

Updated Jan. 14, 2026

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MIRACLE CHILDREN: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises, by Katie Benner and Erica L. Green

The story seemed, and was, too good to be true. Year after year, T.M. Landry College Preparatory Academy, a tiny private school in Louisiana serving mostly Black, working-class children, was sending its graduates to top universities. It had become internet-famous for its viral videos of ecstatic students learning of their acceptance into the Ivy League.

In November 2018, the New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Katie Benner broke the news that much of the academy’s success was a lie. Impressive transcripts were fabricated. Heart-tugging tales of overcoming deprivation and parental neglect were likewise made up by the school’s husband-and-wife leaders, Tracey and Michael Landry. The Ivies were embarrassed and the students branded as frauds.

Seven years later, Benner and Green have published the definitive book-length account of the T.M. Landry scandal. If their original article was an indictment of the school’s deceitful proprietors, their book, “Miracle Children,” makes the case against the punishing inequities and wide-ranging market for Black trauma that enabled the scam.

T.M. Landry was named for its founders, but Tracey barely appears in the book. The narrative centers on Michael, a charismatic grifter and, according to firsthand testimony from multiple students, a violent, serial abuser of children.

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His gift was understanding what everyone wanted most. Social media companies and their consumers amplified the cheap dopamine hits of celebratory college acceptance videos with a racial bent. News media companies desperate for something, anything, that a polarized nation could agree on were drawn to inspiring tales of bootstrapping teens. A society confronted with the faltering promise of racial justice was eager for stories of purely virtuous young Black men and women who defied the odds — and thus proved that those who didn’t had only themselves to blame.

Admissions deans under pressure to increase racial and economic diversity were eager to expand their rosters of prep schools that could send them graduates who met those needs. They were so eager for P.R.-enhancing Black children with dramatic stories of conquering abuse that they somehow didn’t notice, or care, that T.M. Landry was not, by any reasonable definition, a school.

As an unaccredited body, the academy issued “diplomas” that weren’t good even as minimal qualifications in the state of Louisiana. It lacked a standard curriculum, grades, certified teachers and regular tests. Learning, such as it was, consisted of free time, YouTube videos, online classes and relentless ACT prep.

Apparently, no one from Harvard, Yale or Princeton wondered how such a school operating out of a three-room double-wide mobile home was producing robotics whiz kids who spoke fluent Mandarin and founded nonprofits while dodging drug-gang bullets and scrounging for food.

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This is the cover of “Miracle Children,” by Katie Benner and Erica L. Green.

Landry kept the scam aloft by building a cult of personality complete with struggle sessions, physical punishment and messianic speech. He also told Black parents what they had long believed to be true: Society was built to keep their children down. Wealthy white people used private schools and secret connections to ease their children into the halls of power. He was their only chance to do the same. To doubters, he presented the most precious, undeniable currency in the American meritocracy — admissions to elite colleges and universities.

The book begins at the peak of T.M. Landry’s success, a cringe-worthy episode of “Ellen” celebrating two brothers headed to Stanford and Harvard. Benner and Green deftly outline the academic, cultural and political trends that made T.M. Landry possible while filling in Michael and Tracey’s back story. But the best, most engrossing parts of “Miracle Children” come in several long, central chapters describing the families recruited for an ever-expanding design.

Landry flattened his charges into caricatures; the authors restore them to three dimensions with precision and care. Young men and women like Doraian Givens, a viola-playing descendant of scholars and activists, emerge in full form — proud, imperfect and determined. Most of them knew something was off about the Landrys. They also knew that merely being smart and worthy wasn’t enough to enter the academic promised land. The expertly told stories of Doraian and her fellow students fit like gears into the narrative, creating a tension that builds and builds until the authors themselves arrive to blow the operation apart.

Benner and Green are unsparing in their description of Landry’s physical and emotional abuse. As investigative journalists, they let the facts do the talking. Much as you can’t cheat an honest man, the Landry confidence game required a college admissions culture that saw poor Black children as trophies more than people.

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Bryson Sassau was kicked out of parochial and private schools that didn’t want to accommodate his epilepsy. He enrolled at T.M. Landry and endured months of physical and emotional mistreatment. Landry rejected Bryson’s college admissions essay about his disability; colleges, he said, wanted “a story about his mother being a drug addict.” She wasn’t, and Bryson refused. Landry ripped up his efforts again and again. “If you don’t make me cry,” he told students, “it’s not good enough.” For Bryson and his peers, the book describes a terrible twofold realization: that they were trapped in the clutches of a monster, and that his assessment of what it took to get into elite colleges was exactly right.

A lay reader might assume that having your rampant child abuse and elaborate fraud revealed on the front page of the newspaper of record would result in disgrace and prosecution — or at the very least, the end of your scam. The actual story of what happened next in “Miracle Children” is far more sobering, but unsurprising given how convincingly the authors describe the broken system of educational opportunity.

Arguably, Landry’s bad luck was being a little too early. Covid prompted hundreds of colleges to stop requiring ACT and SAT scores, removing the one part of the admissions process he couldn’t lie about. The Supreme Court outlawed race-based affirmative action in 2023, further stoking demand for students with compelling personal stories. “Miracle Children” is an urgent chronicle of corruption inside corruption. It might also be a prophecy of worse to come.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598860)

https://oceanofpdf.com/genres/historical/pdf-epub-miracle-children-race-education-and-a-true-story-of-false-promises-download/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598874)

personal essays are a scam mechanism? unpossible.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598880)

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", their book, “Miracle Children,” makes the case against the punishing inequities and wide-ranging market for Black trauma that enabled the scam."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598888)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA__sb8ZFh8

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598921)

Once in a while you read an explanation for something that just fits so well and explains so much.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598928)

but the principle is so clear on campuses, where real racism is only a minuscule fraction of the overwhelming demand so you end up with countless false flag incidents.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598943)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4146990&forum_id=2Elisa#49598903)