The story seemed, and was, too good to be true. Year after year, T.M. Landry College Preparatory Academy, a tiny private school in Louisiana serving mostly Black, working-class children, was sending its graduates to top universities. It had become internet-famous for its viral videos of ecstatic students learning of their acceptance into the Ivy League.

In November 2018, the New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Katie Benner broke the news that much of the academy’s success was a lie. Impressive transcripts were fabricated. Heart-tugging tales of overcoming deprivation and parental neglect were likewise made up by the school’s husband-and-wife leaders, Tracey and Michael Landry. The Ivies were embarrassed and the students branded as frauds.

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Admissions deans under pressure to increase racial and economic diversity were eager to expand their rosters of prep schools that could send them graduates who met those needs. They were so eager for P.R.-enhancing Black children with dramatic stories of conquering abuse that they somehow didn’t notice, or care, that T.M. Landry was not, by any reasonable definition, a school.

As an unaccredited body, the academy issued “diplomas” that weren’t good even as minimal qualifications in the state of Louisiana. It lacked a standard curriculum, grades, certified teachers and regular tests. Learning, such as it was, consisted of free time, YouTube videos, online classes and relentless ACT prep.

Apparently, no one from Harvard, Yale or Princeton wondered how such a school operating out of a three-room double-wide mobile home was producing robotics whiz kids who spoke fluent Mandarin and founded nonprofits while dodging drug-gang bullets and scrounging for food.

Landry kept the scam aloft by building a cult of personality complete with struggle sessions, physical punishment and messianic speech. He also told Black parents what they had long believed to be true: Society was built to keep their children down. Wealthy white people used private schools and secret connections to ease their children into the halls of power. He was their only chance to do the same. To doubters, he presented the most precious, undeniable currency in the American meritocracy — admissions to elite colleges and universities.

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Bryson Sassau was kicked out of parochial and private schools that didn’t want to accommodate his epilepsy. He enrolled at T.M. Landry and endured months of physical and emotional mistreatment. Landry rejected Bryson’s college admissions essay about his disability; colleges, he said, wanted “a story about his mother being a drug addict.” She wasn’t, and Bryson refused. Landry ripped up his efforts again and again. “If you don’t make me cry,” he told students, “it’s not good enough.” For Bryson and his peers, the book describes a terrible twofold realization: that they were trapped in the clutches of a monster, and that his assessment of what it took to get into elite colleges was exactly right.

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MIRACLE CHILDREN: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises | By Katie Benner and Erica L. Green | Metropolitan Books | 254 pp. | $29.99

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