Louisiana: The “Miracle School” That Was a Fraud
About five weeks ago, I read a story online about a small private school in Louisiana whose students had a 100% college entry rate and were admitted to America’s most selective colleges and universities. It was truly a miraculous school, said the story, because its students were poor black children from adverse circumstances who were all too often struggling in public schools. What was their secret sauce? I sent the story to Gary Rubinstein, who has a knack for detecting fraud, but all he could determine from the state records was that the school was tiny (only 142 students), its graduating class was tiny (class of 2015 had 5 graduates, class of 2016 had 8 graduates, class of 2017 had 13 graduates). The school did not have to supply any data about attrition or anything else. Just enrollment, class size (tiny) and graduation rate. The story implied the superiority of private schools and vouchers. It claimed that poverty and adversity didn’t matter when you did whatever this school was doing, which was not clear from the reports.
But now we know that none of its claims were true.
The New York Times published an expose.
BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.
A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”
The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.
“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.
T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on Continue reading: Louisiana: The “Miracle School” That Was a Fraud | Diane Ravitch's blog