Underprivileged Black Children As Pawns For Profit And Acclaim
Erica L. Green and Katie Benner write in The New York Times about T.M. Landry, a small-town Louisiana school that got national attention for getting its underprivileged black students into elite colleges. How did the school do it? Actually, by cutting corners and fabricating students' background on 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.

Here's the profit motive:

Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the "Today" show, "Ellen" and the "CBS This Morning."

...After each viral video and media appearance, donors including wealthy executives and older Americans on fixed incomes sent money. T.M. Landry took in more than $250,000 in donations this year, a portion of which was earmarked by the donors for tuition assistance, according to records of the donations obtained by The Times.

But the school has not yet offered any scholarships, said Greg Davis, a T.M. Landry board member. Mr. Landry said donations were put into a general account, but he declined to say how the money was spent.

The biggest price is paid by the students who are accepted to schools they aren't actually prepared for:

For yet other Landry students, particularly those who spent multiple years at the school, the results after graduation have been disappointing. Some have withdrawn from college, or transferred to less rigorous programs.

Asja Jackson, whose Wesleyan University acceptance video also went viral, decided to leave this month after she said she fell into a depression over her first-semester struggles. She said she "froze and failed" her first chemistry tests and walked out of a biology exam. Her papers, she said, were "childish," and she was too embarrassed to attend a writing workshop.

She studied and worked through the night, like she had done at T.M. Landry since eighth grade, but she just was not "catching it," she said. She said she eventually stopped eating, talking to her friends, leaving her room or going to class.

"I didn't understand why people around me were doing well, and I wasn't," said Ms. Jackson, who took the advice of her dean and started medical leave. "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."

And what are these kids actually being taught:

Adam Broussard, a Landry parent, noticed last fall that his 8-year-old, who had attended the school since he was 3, was writing "chicken scratch." Mr. Broussard had been happy with the school -- his older son had been admitted to Brown after two years at Landry -- but he confronted Mr. Landry about his younger son's progress. Mr. Landry responded that he did not teach sentence structure and just wanted students to love to write.

An independent assessment at Sylvan Learning Center revealed that Mr. Broussard's younger son was performing two grade levels behind.

"I gave him my son for six years, almost every day, 12 months of the year," Mr. Broussard said of Mr. Landry. "The longer these kids stayed there, the further behind they were."

News of the Broussard boy's low test scores spread last fall, and at least eight parents interviewed by The Times had their own students assessed. Of their 11 students, only two were performing at grade level, while the rest had fallen behind or made no progress. One junior was performing at a fourth-grade level in reading and math.

This is criminally tragic.

The kids who go to this school have parents who are motivated to get them an education -- little did these parents know that the real learning experience (about the school) would come years later, when their kid can't begin to do the work in college.