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A Louisiana Private School’s All-American Grift

In Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises, two reporters uncovered a high school scandal that puts into relief the unfinished work of integration.

A student on his way to his high school commencement in New Orleans, Louisiana, 2007.

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.”

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

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........

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