T.M. Landry College Preparatory School is located in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. According to the school’s website, “T.M. Landry College Prep is an independent, year-round college preparatory school, grades K-12. In 2017, students from TM Landry College Prep graduated and are headed to top universities in the country.” The founders of the school are Tracey and Mike Landry.
Mr. Landry is a teacher and former salesman and Mrs. Landry is a nurse. The Landrys say their graduates have gone on to attend such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan. Viral videos have circulated showing students getting their college acceptances.The student body is comprised of predominately black rural students from low-income families.
This school became a Cinderella story to CBS News, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Today Show. This morning I read an expose in the New York Times about T.M. Landry and let’s just say all that glitters is not gold.
It turns out the application process for Landry students was a series of falsified documents. Raymond Smith Jr., graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at NYU He told the NY Times Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application. Another student, Bryson Sassau, said his application to NYU was all a lie. In his application, Tracey Landry wrote, Mr. Sassau should 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’ (NY Times). Mrs. Landry described Sassau as a child who was raised by an alcoholic father who had beaten him and his mother and denied them money for food and shelter” (NY Times).
None of this was true.
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 (NY Times).
Smith did well at NYU, but had to drop out after his freshman year with mounting debt. Sassau is at St. John’s University and faring well, though he admits he had to drop out of advanced math and science courses as he was struggling.
Other Landry graduates have not had success having to either drop out or transfer to less vigorous programs (NY Times). Asja Jackson, whose Wesleyan University acceptance video went viral, left Wesleyan after she fell into a depression. Her academic struggles were insurmountable. Her writing was weak, one professor calling it childish. “I couldn’t tell my friends because they would say, ‘How did you get into the school then?’ There were too many questions that I couldn’t answer” (NY Times).
Michael Landry has had his brush with the law, facing charges of hitting students, which he admitted to. In one instance his defense of hitting a child was because the child’s mother told him to. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to under go anger management training (NY Times).
Let me be clear in saying I believe EVERY child can succeed in school when they are provide the right tools and support. I am in no way saying I don’t think these students can succeed at Ivy League schools. But one of the responsibilities of any high school is to prepare students for college, and align them to academically appropriate schools. What the Landrys have done is abhorrent. To devalue these students, to take advantage of their situations, to encourage them to lie and deceive the system is bad for everyone, and sends a terrible message.
I admire the New York Times for uncovering the whole story of T.M. Landry School, and the founders. I am all about providing opportunities for underrepresented minorities in college, but students must be given the tools and support services to succeed.
There is more to the story of the Landrys and T.M. Landry School. I encourage you to read the full story in the Times to understand the breadth and depth of their corruption. This goes deeper than charter school corruption, and is more about taking advantage of children for self-serving needs. If their intentions were honorable, they went about this the wrong way.
These are my reflections for today.
12/07/18
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Reflections in Education 