Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here's the Reality.

[demmiblue]

T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications.

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 to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep-black-students.html

Here is a really good Twitter thread on this:

Link to tweet

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1068501207713488896.html

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Sending kids off to colleges they are not academically prepared for

is not a bright idea.

[LisaL]

7. I would say so, because if they are not prepared, what are they chances that they will make it?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. Basically none.

I expect the elite colleges simply don't have the remedial classes or resources to bring the kids up to speed. That's what the community colleges are for, and they can do an excellent job of that.

[dalton99a]

2. "Students described their education as learning from computer programs and YouTube"

What a cruel hoax

[d_r]

3. Those are powerful

Comments in that twitter link and we need more voices saying it.

[LuckyStrykes]

4. We need to make public schools stronger

What is wrong with a strong public school system? Why should tax payers pay for sub-par education run by hucksters? No oversight is setting our children up for failure and abuse.

[Pa-Kid]

5. Public school tax dollars

have no business being used to run charter schools .

[LisaL]

6. I guess if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.