'Miracle Children' explores admissions scandal that exposed inequalities in education

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: A few years ago, a small private school in an underprivileged Black community in Louisiana, the T.M. Landry College Preparatory Academy, made national headlines for propelling student after student into elite universities like Harvard and Yale.

But as New York Times journalists Katie Benner and Erica Green report in their new book, “Miracle Children,” the school’s success was built on lies and threats.

I spoke with Benner and Green and began by asking what led them to look into this school.

Katie Benner: It was very unusual because I was covering the Justice Department at the time, but Erica and I had both seen the viral videos when they were on all over social media.

And like everybody else in the country, we were so excited about these students getting into Harvard and Princeton and Stanford, Yale, et cetera. And part of the reason we were excited about it is because they were Black students just achieving the highest heights.

So when I got a call from a source, actually a former DOJ source who said that she’d heard that something else was happening at the school, that there was misconduct, that there might be an abusive situation, and that the students themselves were being manipulated by their teachers to lie about their lives in order to get into these elite schools, I called Erica immediately.

She was our education policy reporter. And I said:”I think this is a real story. You would know better though. You cover education, but this feels like it’s the kind of story that tells us a lot about race in America.”

Amna Nawaz: Erica, I’d imagine with so many people invested in the school and invested in selling that story, it might be hard to get people to talk to you about it, was it?

Erica L. Green: Believe it or not, this was a rare case in my career where we had droves of people ready to talk about it.

And that is why it gave us this sense of urgency. There were families who had collected stories about what was transpiring in the school over a few months. They were prying out of their children that was very disturbing. And they reached out for help in their own communities, got none, and they banded together and decided that they wanted to talk to The Times.

Amna Nawaz: There’s so many compelling stories in here. I want to get into a more detail.

But, Katie, for anyone unfamiliar, just briefly, what was the fraud being perpetrated here by the school founders, the couple that ran the school? That’s Mike and Tracey Landry.

Katie Benner: Right.

So, first, I think we need to say that Mike and Tracey Landry, the founder of the school, have denied all wrongdoing. So all of our reporting in the book and the original New York Times story is based on legal documents, court records, police records, and the interviews with students that corroborate one another.

But what the students had been forced to do was to lie about their lives and to lean into really negative stereotypes about Black America on their college applications, to say that they had been homeless, that their parents had been addicted to drugs, and all sorts of other really terrible things, because Mike and Tracey told them that that’s what white admissions officers wanted from Black people.

They also suffered a lot of psychological, emotional, and physical violence at that school to keep them in line. For Mike and Tracey, they were Making Money. They were charging tuition, and they had a lot of admissions offices at some of the most elite colleges in the country adoring them.

And one of the things they did to keep the students in line was say, if you expose us, if you tell anybody, we will make sure you do not get into your dream school. You’re not going to get into MIT. You won’t get into Yale. We will rescind your application.

Amna Nawaz: Erica, take us inside the mind-set of some of these families, obviously, the ones you have met with who wanted to speak out about this, who were in some sense ostracized because they wanted to speak out, but the many families that some folks may look at and say, why did they let their kids continue to participate in this?

Erica L. Green: For them, they brokered a deal with Mike. He said, give me your children. Give me your most precious commodity. And I’m going to take them further than you ever could.

He very much preyed and seized on this deficit model that has existed for decades. But he seized on their fears and their vulnerabilities, whether it was that they had not gone to college themselves or they couldn’t afford to send their kids to college or they couldn’t even guide them through the process.

So he really did just hit every vulnerability that they had as working-class, predominantly Black families in a very-low-income part of one of the poor states in the country. At the end of the day, they were seeing results. They saw the viral videos that were being eaten up by celebrities, by the first lady of the United States.

So it’s not like it was just a gamble. It was an equation.

Amna Nawaz: I mean, it was your article for The New York Times that blew it all up, that called attention to this.

But, Katie, the book really grounds it not just in what happened and in more storytelling and in more perspectives, but in the historical context. Why is that necessary here?

Katie Benner: I think that we have to understand that the country has fought oftentimes in schoolhouses about whether or not it wants to have a racial hierarchy or not. Education is one of the most powerful tools to allow us to widen the circle of who gets to be an American or to close it off.

And so understanding that history helps us understand why the students were making some of the choices they were making, why they felt cut off from educational opportunity, and even why we were cheering so hard for these Black students to get into Stanford or Yale and not questioning what that says about our expectations of Black Americans writ large.

One of the lawyers who worked with the students said, would we have been cheering like this, would these videos have gone viral if the students in the videos had been white and getting into Stanford or if they had been Black and been getting into a state school? What is that telling us about who we are?

Amna Nawaz: Erica, what do you want people to take away from this book?

Erica L. Green: I think what we really hope is that people really self-reflect about their own expectations of Black children.

I think we have to question what we demand of them to just achieve opportunities and the kinds of American dreams that are handed to other groups of children on a silver platter. And, also, we have to just recognize that this is — opportunity has become transactional.

And for a certain subset of Americans, that means you can pay to get your way into an Ivy League or an elite college. And for Black children, they’re paying with their dignity. Their price has become higher. And we all have to ask ourselves why. And the big takeaway for me is that Black children do not have to be damaged to be valuable.

Amna Nawaz: The book is “Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises.” The authors are Erica Green and Katie Benner.

Thank you so much.

Erica L. Green: Thank you.

Katie Benner: Thank you.