In December 2017, a tiny K–12 private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, went viral for the remarkable achievements of two of its graduating seniors. Videos of brothers Alex and Ayrton Little opening their college-admission decisions in a dim room of the T.M. Landry College Preparatory School, surrounded by cheering classmates, racked up millions of views on YouTube. Alex was going to Stanford; Ayrton, who had skipped a grade, to Harvard. Like most of their classmates, the brothers were Black. Perhaps that’s why NPR and the Today show featured the college-acceptance videos, and why CBS This Morning highlighted the Littles’ success during its recurring segment “A More Perfect Union,” which “aims to show that what unites us as Americans is stronger than what divides us.”

A January 2018 appearance by the Little brothers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show underlined the appeal of the T.M. Landry narrative: The brothers had overcome a childhood of privation and near-homelessness, DeGeneres told her audience, to make it to the top of their class and earn early acceptance into elite colleges. The CBS segment, meanwhile, highlighted the unconventional school that seemed to make the Littles’ success—and the success of its other Ivy League admits—possible. T.M. Landry’s founders and namesakes, the married couple Tracey and Mike Landry, boasted that their “no-frills” school, which they said enrolled students with an average family income of $32,000, had a 100 percent admission rate for graduating seniors and routinely sent its students to elite colleges. The school, which operated out of a former factory building and cost approximately $600 a month per student, didn’t mandate either textbooks or required classes. In place of a standard curriculum, the school stressed test prep. It created an environment of intense competition; as a former student, James Dennis (who was accepted early to Yale), told CBS, “Because you’re with all these other people that are always striving toward greatness just like you are, it’s almost like you have no choice but to conform to it.”    

In November 2018, T.M. Landry was in the national news again, this time in The New York Times. Far from celebrating the school’s successes, though, reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green uncovered years of emotional and physical abuse and fraud at T.M. Landry, which was unaccredited and issued diplomas that the state of Louisiana did not recognize. Their article exposed the “Cinderella story” that had attracted national attention and adoration for the fiction it was—one that covered up a reality where “the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity.” Some T.M. Landry alumni did fare well at the elite universities they matriculated at, especially if they had transferred to Landry late in high school, lured by the school’s narrative of college-admissions excellence. That was the case with the Little brothers, who’d arrived at the school just months before their viral admissions videos. Others, like Asja Jackson, felt ill-prepared—she dropped out of Wesleyan University after two months, embarrassed by the “childish” papers she wrote and the exams she failed. 

The Landrys, who have no formal background in education, kept parents in the dark about the school’s actual practices by telling them to “feed and clothe their children—and that Mr. Landry would take care of the rest,” Benner and Green write. “Apprehensive families were placated by videos of students solving tough math problems and being accepted to college.” Students, meanwhile, were cowed into keeping quiet—older kids spent their days taking endless ACT practice tests, while younger children largely played—and a “culture of fear” permeated the school. Physical punishments like being forced to kneel were routine and coded as tough love; Mike Landry was also reported to choke students and slam them on desks. Contributing to this “culture of fear” was the students’ belief that the Landrys had total power over their futures. Mike told them that “he had special relationships with college deans, particularly at Harvard, and that he could use them to help students get into college—or to keep them out,” Benner and Green write. He even convinced students that “college officers observed them through the school’s security cameras,” an utter fabrication.

Two weeks after the publication of Benner and Green’s initial reporting, the Louisiana State Police opened an investigation into the allegations of physical abuse at T.M. Landry. Then, in 2019, the FBI launched an inquiry into the fraudulent admissions practices uncovered by the Times. Yet the Landrys remained adamant that they had done nothing wrong, and they kept the school open despite dwindling enrollment. The class of 2019 shrank from 16 students to four, but the school still posted an admissions video to its Facebook page showcasing all the colleges that had accepted the seniors. Some families and colleges were still buying the Landrys’ narrative, it appeared. 

Eight years after the Littles’ appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show at the height of their alma mater’s virality, Benner and Green have published Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises. The book is an examination of the scandal that expands on their original investigation, which it situates within the context of the persistence of America’s racial caste system and the ongoing fight for equitable access to education. In revisiting the T.M. Landry story nearly a decade later, Benner and Green aim to demonstrate that the Landrys’ fraud and abuse was enabled by an educational system built on inequality and a college-admissions culture that rewards stories of Black and brown kids overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds through grit alone.

Indeed, such stories “seemed to show that racial inequality could be defeated by anyone—and that those who failed simply did not want to succeed,” Benner and Green write. “Yet T.M. Landry students can be understood through another lens: as success stories that obscure the gulf between the efforts of the civil rights movement, on the one hand, and the achievement gap for black America on the other.” The fight for equal access to education was supposedly won in the mid-20th century, thanks to federal rulings and laws such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations. But as Benner and Green argue, the promises of the civil-rights era have never been fully realized, and Americans have been loath to reckon with how the unfinished business of implementing true integration has instead preserved a near-impervious state of racial inequality. 

With this historical backdrop in view, the narrative that T.M. Landry put forward—one of Black teens who overcame miserable upbringings to earn acceptance into the nation’s top colleges—fits into a larger scam that Americans have long been content to buy into. “In the shadow of the post–civil rights era, the celebration of exceptional people of color allows many Americans to deny the reality of persistent racial inequality and go on with their lives without recognizing that the nation has failed to deliver a just world,” Benner and Green write. “The country can believe it has shed its racial hierarchy by celebrating the exceptional few, even if their exceptionalism has roots in low and stingy expectations.”

Miracle Children is at its most compelling when it focuses on how T.M. Landry—a school that was originally founded to educate “black trouble makers”—was able to exist in the first place, thanks to Louisiana laws and policies that sought to enshrine segregated schooling in the aftermath of Brown. It wouldn’t be until two decades after that ruling that Louisiana’s public schools finally integrated, but the state created loopholes that allowed “segregation academies”—private schools that educated only white children—to receive federal funding. In the 1970s, Louisiana also passed laws that “allowed private academies that did not seek state recognition or government funding to operate outside desegregation rules and other standards,” Benner and Green explain. “Designated as ‘nonpublic schools not seeking state approval,’ they were not accredited and were not required to hire state-certified teachers or adhere to a state-approved curriculum.” T.M. Landry, which relied on free video courses from Khan Academy and an incoherent pedagogy of student-centered “mastery learning” that mostly amounted to the rote memorization of how to solve ACT questions, thus operated without oversight—a fact it was not required to make clear to tuition-paying families. It’s especially rich that a school that advertised itself as uplifting Black children in a world of low expectations was free to harm those children thanks to loopholes created to uphold segregation.    

Benner and Green stumble, however, as they weave in the story of how elite colleges were pushed to diversify in recent decades, and how T.M. Landry capitalized on an admissions environment that prized stories of Black, low-income students demonstrating resilience and achievement. While there exists robust reporting and analysis on the recent attempts by highly selective colleges to recruit students from socioeconomically and racially diverse backgrounds, Miracle Children doesn’t appear to draw much on this literature. The authors present a muddled and limited picture of how and why colleges sought to diversify their student bodies in the 2000s—before the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that ended race-conscious, affirmative-action-based admissions—focusing mostly on examples that show universities taking the initiative on their own to court applicants from underserved backgrounds. For instance, Benner and Green write about how, in 2003, Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of Brown University, appointed a committee to study Brown’s historical relationship to slavery, which “recommended that the university address its past by expanding opportunities to students disadvantaged by the vestiges of slavery and the slave trade.” The authors note that Harvard and Georgetown conducted similar investigations and recommended similar reparations. But they leave largely unexplored the pressures that such institutions faced to confront their racist pasts and diversify their student bodies. In this regard, Miracle Children doesn’t fully illuminate how and why the Ivy League and other highly selective colleges were so susceptible to the fraudulent applications of T.M. Landry students, which spun false tales of tragedy and redemption and featured courses and extracurricular activities that did not exist.