Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here's the Reality.
Source: New York Times
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
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.
By Erica L. Green and Katie Benner
Photographs by Annie Flanagan
Nov. 30, 2018
-snip-
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.
Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.
In reality, 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. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.
The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.
-snip-
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.
By Erica L. Green and Katie Benner
Photographs by Annie Flanagan
Nov. 30, 2018
-snip-
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.
Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.
In reality, 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. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.
The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep-black-students.html
______________________________________________________________________
Source: Washington Post
Another 'miracle’ school exposed. Sigh.
By Valerie Strauss
November 30 at 4:19 PM
Twenty years ago, the famed Yale child psychiatrist and educator James Comer published a book, “Waiting for A Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and How We Can.”
Two decades later, Americans still fall for the notion of “miracle schools,” those hailed by politicians and policymakers as having some secret sauce that can turn around troubled schools seemingly without much trouble and work wonders for needy students.
The only problem is that these stories virtually always get debunked. Remember when we learned within the last year that the “miracle” D.C. school system was graduating many of its students without the requisite requirements?
Now, we have a new scandal revealed in an exposé by reporters Erica L. Green and Katie Benner of the New York Times. They investigated the private K-12 T.M. Landry School in Louisiana, which was famed for getting its mostly black and working-class students into elite colleges.
-snip-
By Valerie Strauss
November 30 at 4:19 PM
Twenty years ago, the famed Yale child psychiatrist and educator James Comer published a book, “Waiting for A Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and How We Can.”
Two decades later, Americans still fall for the notion of “miracle schools,” those hailed by politicians and policymakers as having some secret sauce that can turn around troubled schools seemingly without much trouble and work wonders for needy students.
The only problem is that these stories virtually always get debunked. Remember when we learned within the last year that the “miracle” D.C. school system was graduating many of its students without the requisite requirements?
Now, we have a new scandal revealed in an exposé by reporters Erica L. Green and Katie Benner of the New York Times. They investigated the private K-12 T.M. Landry School in Louisiana, which was famed for getting its mostly black and working-class students into elite colleges.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/11/30/another-miracle-school-exposed-sigh/
