Miracle Children: The Price of Admission | 226

T. M Landry was a small independent school in Louisiana that gained national fame for sending kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to Ivy League schools. The viral videos were inspiring. The acceptance letters were real. But behind the scenes, the school doctored transcripts and fabricated personal stories to get students in – and behind closed doors, students endured psychological and physical abuse at the hands of the school’s founders. In this episode, we talk with the two New York Times reporters who broke the story – Erica L. Green and Katie Benner, authors of Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scaachi Koul?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all our episodes of Scamfluencers ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. A heads up to our listeners. This episode contains descriptions of physical abuse involving children. Please listen with care.

• 0:23Scaachi Koul?

  Sarah, we talk about this a lot, but what do you think about the scam of higher education? I mean, like, our best understanding of this is the Canadian university system, which isn't as steeped in money and connections that you need to get into a particular school. I feel like whenever I hear about American colleges, it just feels like a racket. I think especially in the US, it's a racket because, one, it's so expensive, and there's just like such a crazy hierarchy for getting into different schools. Like, you go to an elite university or college and your life is, like, set, but you're only able to get into it because your parents had enough money or whatever. So I do think it's extremely questionable.

• 1:06Scaachi Koul?

  Well, I ask because I got a chance to talk to two reporters who broke a shocking and upsetting story about the unruly and cruel tactics one particular feeder school used to get their students into good colleges, no matter how much it hurt.

• 1:29Scaachi Koul?

  It's early January 2018, and 16-year-old Ayrton Little stands with his older brother, Alex, on a soundstage in Los Angeles. The brothers are backstage at the Ellen DeGeneres Show, far from their home in tiny Bro Bridge, Louisiana. Ayrton is wearing a Harvard sweater and has brown curly hair and a wide smile. He's the spitting image of 18-year-old Alex, except Alex's hair is a little shorter and he's wearing a Stanford sweater. The two are about to be featured on Ellen's mega-popular daytime talk show. While they wait, they hear Ellen playing two viral videos for her audience. Recordings of the moments last month, when Ayrton found out he got into Harvard and Alex got into Stanford.

• 2:12Scaachi Koul?

  By now, the videos have been shared far and wide, including by Michelle Obama, and racked up more than 8 million views. You might have seen videos like this before. Sarah, can you describe them? Oh, can I describe an Ellen clip? Yeah, let me hit up EllenTube right now. These videos are now extra-popular because of TikTok, where it's like, you know, a student in front of a laptop, surrounded by their friends and family. They get into the school they want, and it's like this crazy celebration. And it's kind of become this, like, thing that you see around this time of year. It's like a typical Ellen thing. Like, these two boys are on the couch and they're talking to her, and it was like Ellen was always doing this, getting viral kids to LA for an interview.

• 2:57Scaachi Koul?

  Well, Ellen brings the brothers out, and her audience showers them with applause. It must be a nerve-wracking moment, but Ayrton and Alex seem at ease on Ellen's white leather couch. They introduce themselves and tell Ellen that making acceptance videos is a tradition for graduating seniors at their small, private school, TM Landry College Preparatory School. The brothers are charming and confident, all smiles as Ellen explains their tragic backstory.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  You were raised by a single mom. You were on the verge of being homeless for most of your lives. You spent years in a home with no heat, no food, a lot of times, and you would leave the oven burners on to keep you warm at night. Your younger brother passed away a couple of years ago, and through all of this, you maintained the highest GPAs in your class. That is amazing.

• 3:49Scaachi Koul?

  This is really hard to hear. It's so sad, and I feel like it is very appealing to hear these stories and these success stories because it kind of enforces this American dream of, like, pulling yourself up from the bootstraps, no matter what happened to you. Yeah, exactly. Ellen showers praise on Ayrton's mom, Maureen. She gifts the brothers furniture and gift cards to outfit their dorm rooms in style. And she brings out a gigantic check for $20,000 for Maureen. Finally, she asks Ayrton what he wants to do after college.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  The dream is to get a job on Wall Street, and with that money and influence, I want to make a nonprofit so it can help students that were in our situation and just help them, because I know that I would have definitely wanted, definitely wanted somebody to help my mom.

• 4:39Scaachi Koul?

  The audience eats this up. Ayrton and Alex are the kind of inspirational story that feels like it was scripted just for feel-good segments on daytime TV. And in this case, it was. Ayrton and Alex really did get into two of the most prestigious schools in the country, but they'd been coached by Mike and Tracy Landry, the founders of their school, to exaggerate their personal stories. Maureen did experience a rough financial patch after splitting up with the boys' father, but by the time Alex and Ayrton were in high school, she was working as a chef and running her own catering business. Before TM Landry, the boys had gone to an expensive private academy.

• 5:21Scaachi Koul?

  They transferred because TM Landry boasted a jaw-dropping 100% college acceptance rate, and many of their mostly-black graduates had gone on to Ivy League schools. When they arrived at the school, Mike shared his secret for getting kids into these exclusive academic institutions: play up or invent hard-scrabble backstories. Tragic personal stories paired with sometimes exaggerated transcripts played right into the biases, conscious or unconscious, of administrators at mostly-white schools, the same way it did for Ellen's audience. Mike believes that elite colleges are looking at more than transcripts.

• 6:03Scaachi Koul?

  They're looking for a story, and if you give them the right one, the gates will swing open. Behind their smiles, Ayrton and Alex were pressing down guilt about the exaggerated story Ellen was celebrating. And they were hiding even darker truths about TM Landry, shocking psychological and physical abuse that students were frightened to share and parents could hardly believe. Mike and Tracy built a sterling reputation for running a school that turned out heartwarming stories of black children overcoming tragedy to achieve an education. But when two New York Times reporters started asking hard questions, they revealed that what the students actually had to overcome were Mike and Tracy themselves.

• 6:52Speaker 03

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• 7:38Speaker 04

  I'm Candace DeLong, host of the podcast Killer Psyche. In our latest episode, we go inside the case of Lindsey Clancy, the postpartum psychosis defense, and the stunning mistrial that just reignited a national debate. Listen to Killer Psyche on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 8:01Scaachi Koul?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And this is Scamfluencers.

• 8:15Scaachi Koul?

  Every year, over a million families pour their savings and their sanity into the college admissions process. It's supposed to be a meritocracy. Work hard, get good grades, write a killer essay, and you're in. But what happens when someone figures out how to game the system? Today, we're talking to Erica L. Green and Katie Benner, two New York Times reporters who broke the story of TM Landry, a small, independent school in Louisiana that gained national fame for sending kids from disadvantaged backgrounds off to Ivy League schools. Their book, Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises, tells the full story, and it's dark. When concerned parents raised the alarm, Erica and Katie's reporting revealed that

• 8:59Scaachi Koul?

  TM Landry students weren't really getting an education. They were mostly learning how to juice their standardized test scores. The school reportedly doctored transcripts and exaggerated personal stories, all in the pursuit of acceptance at elite institutions. And behind closed doors, students endured psychological and physical abuse at the hands of school founders, Mike and Tracy Landry. What Mike and Tracy Landry called a school was more like a factory, one that exploited racist stereotypes to gain media attention and acclaim, and left a community of vulnerable kids and their families reeling. I'm calling this episode Miracle Children: The Price of Admission.

• 9:43Scaachi Koul?

  Katie and Erica, thank you so much for joining us. Let's start with how most people would have known TM Landry through their viral videos. Katie, do you remember how you first came across one of these videos of a TM Landry student getting accepted into a prestigious college? I feel like we see them all the time now.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  This would have been almost a decade ago. I saw them, and Erica saw them. We saw them in the wild, because they did go viral. So we saw them in our social media. We had shared them independently. This is before we'd ever discussed this story. And so imagine my dismay when I got a call from a source, and a source calls and says, "Hi, you're not an education reporter, but I got a tip from a friend about this school, and you might have heard of it." She said the school made famous with the videos of usually-black students getting into their dream schools, and their dream schools are all Ivy League schools.

• 10:34Scaachi Koul?

  That was in October 2018. The source was former Federal prosecutor Ashley McFarland. What did she tell you?

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Somebody she had worked with had a relative who had tried to enroll in this school because they saw the videos and they too wanted to be able to go to Harvard or Stanford or Yale. And they found that when they got there, none of the things that they were promised, either in the videos or in the marketing for the school, or even in some of the things they'd heard the founders, Mike and Tracy, talk about, none of those things seemed to be real or really happening. And at that time, there was a core of parents, of families and of students that were rebelling against what was happening in the school and trying to figure out if somebody could help them expose the things that they felt were wrong. And so upon hearing all this, Ashley said, "I'm willing to hear you out. I don't know what I can do for you, no longer a federal prosecutor,

• 11:25Speaker 05

  but I can, I can at least understand what it is you want to say that you've been through and see where we go."

• 11:32Scaachi Koul?

  What were some of the claims that she told you that the families were alleging? And which ones alarmed you the most?

• 11:38Speaker 05

  Well, I think the two claims alarmed me the most. I thought certainly that the allegations that students were lying on their applications, but not just lying, because that does happen often, that they were making up stories. They were leaning into negative stereotypes about Black America to garner sympathy from mostly white institutions to get into college. And I thought that is such a complicated thing to do. It's not something that I felt I could judge out of hand. I couldn't dismiss it. Everybody knows that's not what you're supposed to do. And at the same time, understanding their reasons for why was important to me. But the other claim that I found particularly jarring was, were the claims of physical

• 12:22Speaker 05

  and emotional abuse that the students and their families had laid out to Ashley.

• 12:28Scaachi Koul?

  Erica, can you tell me what that call was like with Katie after she spoke with Ashley? What kind of conversation did you have?

• 12:35Speaker 05

  I really do remember it very vividly. I was in the middle of a story. It was the evening. And we were friends and we had worked on stories together. So her calling me at that time, like, wasn't out of the ordinary. Because we've certainly gossiped a lot for hours during that time. I could tell in her voice, I mean, she was like, Erica. And I'm like, what? She's like, you know that school that has the viral videos? And I was like, yeah, I love them. I love those videos. And she's like, what if I told you that it wasn't real? And I was just, I didn't even want to believe it. My heart sank. And she's like, you know, we have families who are ready to talk about what is going on in the school. And they all just discovered all of this crazy stuff.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  And you know, as a reporter, if people are willing to talk to you, especially families blowing the whistle on a school, even if it implicates them, you get there as soon as possible. And so I was on a plane within 48 hours. It was really tough because, A, I just didn't want to believe it because I couldn't believe that adults would do that to children. The abuse really, really got to me for obvious reasons. But also, I knew in my heart, from being an education reporter, from being a Black woman, that if this were true, we were about to potentially affirm what so many people think about Black children anyway. Right.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  So the ramifications of this immediately flooded my psyche. And I also made sure to tell her that she had to do a story with me, that I wasn't going to do it alone, that she wasn't passing along a tip, that we were in it together.

• 14:17Scaachi Koul?

  Erica, can you tell me a bit about what the reputation of TM Landry was? I'm wondering if you can kind of place it within schools and, you know, what kind of students they were bringing in?

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Sure, sure. TM Landry, it had gotten media coverage for the viral videos. And it's so interesting when you go back and look now. They faced very little skepticism and they were always able to push back against that by invoking stereotypes of Black people, right? So if someone said, this model seems strange, you know, you don't have traditional classes, like, what's going on here? Mike Landry would always be able to say, well, our methods work and you are casting doubt on our students' ability to be successful because they're Black, and people would back off. TM Landry borrowed from a lot of models that were already in existence. So there were charter schools that were very hardcore college prep academies,

• 15:13Speaker 05

  like KIPP Academy, right? They borrowed from Montessori. They borrowed from all of these kind of non-traditional models that had cropped up during the education reform movements. So they were recognizable enough. And the results were speaking for themselves. So in the community, TM Landry was a beacon. It had a reputation for being a haven, if you will. It was a miracle factory. And even folks in the community who were very well aware that Mike Landry was peculiar in many ways, including being incredibly aggressive and hostile, they kind of revered him and what this school was starting to stand for, which was breaking the mold.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  They had figured out the formula to afford these young people opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.

• 16:09Scaachi Koul?

  You decided you two were in this together. So what were your next steps as reporters? What did you guys decide to do next for the story?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  So we kind of split up the work. Again, Erica, like she said, she was down in Brookbridge, Louisiana, as fast as she could get there. She was there with Ashley in that first meeting. And I think that it was extremely important that that was the dynamic. They already trusted Ashley. And because Erica is a really warm person and somebody who had covered education, somebody who had worked with families, she was able to build a bridge of trust immediately with the families.

• 16:43Scaachi Koul?

  Erica, can you describe that first meeting? What kinds of stories are they telling you?

• 16:48Speaker 05

  It's overwhelming to think about even now. We meet in this, like, unmarked, undisclosed location. It's like an office in the middle of nowhere. There's like a big conference room, I mean, really draft box, like gray. I walk in and the room is just packed with at least two dozen people. This group of families had gone head to head with Mike already. They were banding together. They were exchanging information. And so they were really ready to roll. I just knew that first time I was there to build trust. I'm standing in front of them and I'm just allowing everyone to just spill.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  I needed to kind of see who was who and get a sense of their shared experiences and who was unique. It was hours, I mean, to the point where it got dark, we brought in dinner, of people just pouring their hearts out. There was crying. Kids were telling me stories that their parents hadn't heard yet. Their parents who had not questioned much about TM Landry, right? Because that was the rule. Some of the parents got, in that meeting, got the courage to finally start asking their children questions. It was honestly just a trauma bonding experience. I just let them go on for as long as they could. And it was a really tough, tough night. And so I needed to just get a sense of what we were dealing with here.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  And that is what that meeting was for. I'm a Black woman in America. I had covered education. So to have someone who understood the gravity of this story and what the Landrys did on a personal level was helpful. And it was very much apparent to me that I felt like this was their last hope. It was really emotional. So I just packed that on up and took it back to Katie.

• 18:48Scaachi Koul?

  So what did you guys think the students wanted to get out of speaking to the Times? What did the families want? What were they hoping to achieve?

• 18:56Speaker 05

  I think the simplest way of putting it is that they felt that they had been cheated and a lot of things had been stolen from them, not least of which was their dignity, their safety and their money. They felt that Mike had lied to them about not what he could achieve for them because there was evidence, there were kids getting into Harvard and Yale, but that how he was going to do it. I don't think anybody would sign up for having their children be emotionally terrorized, physically hurt in order to go to college. And I don't think that the students, when they look back now especially, feel that what they got wasn't education. You know, they were not taking classes.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  They were really just prepping for the ACT. It was like an ACT boot camp. And if you take a practice test enough for months and months and months on end, you're going to do well. And I think that for the students on balance, they understand that's not an education. It did not leave them with the things that they wanted to have. Again, including feeling like they had their dignity and that they were being treated the way they wanted to be treated. And that constant weighing of risk reward of saying, is it worth enduring this humiliation? Because then I get to go to Wesleyan, was something that they were doing every day. Parents had their motives, students had their motives. But at the end of the day, the main reason to go to the press

• 20:23Speaker 05

  was we want this person to be held to account for what he's done.

• 20:27Scaachi Koul?

  You know, this is a story with so many victims and so many layers. The families had been quiet and then ignored for so long because many people were scared to tell or acknowledge the truth. What did you see as the biggest potential consequence of moving forward with the story? How did the families feel about the possible consequences of speaking out?

• 20:47Speaker 05

  I would say the biggest concern was there were students on these college campuses who might get kicked out of school. And these are their, their friends, some of their family, who they understood, should they go through with this, they put everybody in jeopardy. And these kids had gone through so much together, being at TM Landry, that there was a deep, deep concern and fear that it would negatively impact so many of their classmates who they had seen work so hard and endure so much at TM Landry to get to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and all of the places that the students had gone.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  But none of those fears were enough for any of the families to have any hesitation in doing this. To be honest, like, I had more hesitation than the families did about this story. They, like, pulled me along.

• 21:45Scaachi Koul?

  It's something that emerged more when we were

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Working on the book than on the story that a lot of their hesitation was being seen as betraying their own community. It's like there is finally a positive story about a black man here in Louisiana, who is working quote unquote miracles and helping black families get their kids into life-changing schools by hook or by crook. And that are, did they want to be the families to destroy all of that? I was so struck by it in terms of how well the students themselves were able to articulate this fear. Yeah, this whole idea of trying to tear the black man down, which by the way, you know, Mike instilled in them to protect itself.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  But that was a real, that that dynamic is real. And I even got that after the story came out. I was even asked how I could have done this story as a black reporter. So yeah, that was deep.

• 22:42Scaachi Koul?

  And after you met the families and some former and current students, you needed to approach Mike and Tracy Landry. Let's hear more about the founders of the school. How would you describe them?

• 22:52Speaker 05

  Mike and Tracy were really fascinating characters. In many ways, you can understand why predominantly white institutions would find them so fascinating because their own life stories in many ways kind of comport with this made-for-TV movie vision of what we think should happen if you're a minority in America and you make it. They both grew up in the same very, very impoverished and neglected neighborhood in Broadbridge, Louisiana. Their mothers were very young when they had them. Tracy's mother couldn't read. Mike's mother was a teenager and in his telling, she was an alcoholic. They didn't have a lot of strong role models.

• 23:33Speaker 05

  And again, in their telling of their life story, it is thanks to going to school, thanks to inspirational teachers, that they are able to go to college. And Tracy becomes a nurse. And in his telling, Mike claims to work at a job at a stock brokerage. So when you're looking at it from the lens of what I would call kind of middle-class white America, this is the story that we as a nation want to hear, that we're still a country of opportunity. And the fact of your race or what socioeconomic class you're born into is not going to stop you from achieving your dream. So then these inspirational educators go on to start a school. And what could be better than that? So you can understand why there was a lot of desire to support them.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Of course, as we dug more into, especially Mike's background, some of the things we found were a little bit more alarming. You know, I don't think he ever really did work for Dean Witter. There was no evidence of that. We spoke with family members who he had approached and said, I will invest your money, your retirement. And then they never saw that money again. You know, he did serve in the military. That is true. But then there were other parts of his story that he just didn't really want to share with the institutions that he was approaching and wooing on behalf of his school, including the fact that he had had a child before the two kids he had that went to T M Landry that he adopted. His story is not necessarily an unusual story in terms of how complicated it is. I think all of us, if we really looked at our own life stories, there would be a lot of moments that we might not want to share with the whole world.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  I would just say, though, his appeal was that his story was simple. It's a simple story of a young black kid who has nothing and through the force of his own will and the power of education becomes successful.

• 25:15Scaachi Koul?

  And how would you describe Tracy?

• 25:18Speaker 05

  She was very much a partner in the school. She had a big presence in the school. The students feared her as much as they feared Mike, if for different reasons. They felt that she had a lot of emotional control over them. But it's Mike who's the showman, if that makes any sense, the way he dresses and the bright colors. It was like if you took Ralph Lauren polo and, and on acid or something, these like bright yellow, red, almost costumes. And he loves to charm people, especially people he thinks of as powerful. Tracy is in many ways kind of keeping things rolling. She was the balance, but she was like the cover too. Right?

• 25:58Speaker 05

  She was the normal half that kind of, I'm sure, made all of this a lot more palatable. She really actually tried to look the part and walk the part of a teacher. She wasn't the one hitting. Her tearing up essays is not, it just pales, right? When we're talking about a man who's throwing kids across the room by their necks. But Tracy was the spender. She had a lot of shoes. She had a lot of fancy clothes. She, again, I think the students saw her as both like a buffer and also like a co-conspirator. In one of the allegations we find in a police report of Mike beating a student

• 26:42Speaker 05

  with his belt, it's Tracy who steps in and says, this is enough. You know, the students witnessed this scene and what they tell the police is that Mike is hitting this student again and again. He's whipping him. Tracy has to step in and say, Mike, this is enough.

• 26:58Scaachi Koul?

  Mike and Tracy Landry love to tell the world their inspiring story about how education helped two kids from the wrong side of the tracks pull themselves up by their bootstraps. After the break, we'll get into why they were compelled to start a school of their own and how it went so wrong.

• 27:23Speaker 06

  Imagine you're reading Pride and Prejudice, except you're not reading it. Harris Dickinson and Marissa Abella are reading it to you on Audible. Her barbs sting you. His coldness sends a shiver up your spine. Your heart aches. Your ears burn. You yearn for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to profess their undying love for one another. You can't bear it any longer. Well, maybe a chapter longer. Performance is so good, you'll give love a second chance. Audible, stories that speak to you.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  On January 24th, 2023, in Ducksbury, Massachusetts, Patrick Clancy called 911. He had found his wife Lindsay badly injured and his three children dead and dying. What followed would become one of the most searing and complicated cases in recent memory, raising hard questions about motherhood, mental illness, and how far our justice system will go to understand what really happened. I'm Candace DeLong, host of the podcast Killer Psyche. In our latest episode, we take you inside the case of Lindsay Clancy, the postpartum psychosis defense, the courtroom battle, and the trial that just ended in a stunning mistrial.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Follow Killer Psyche wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Killer Psyche one week early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 28:59Scaachi Koul?

  Mike and Tracy Landry clearly place a lot of value on education, or at least how it's tied to being perceived as successful. But they didn't go to school to become teachers or administrators. In the book, you talk about the moment that inspired them to start their own school. It was 2005, and Mike realized that despite having earned stellar grades in elementary school, his son could barely read. The way they saw it, the public school system had such low expectations for black students that kids were just being pushed through whether they were learning anything or not.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  The way they tell it, they were inspired to start a school, to take their own destinies into their own hands. Mike quit his job. He wanted to stay home and tutor and teach his kid himself, particularly after he went in to meet with his kids' teachers. And they didn't seem to care that there was this huge disconnect between their academic abilities and their grades. So he cast the public school system as the school-to-prison pipeline, and he was going to stop it. So that's why they started the school to save their own children. And then once people in the neighborhood saw how well their children were doing, they

• 30:11Speaker 05

  too wanted Mike to, to take their children and, and, and teach them as well. And that's how this whole movement got started. So they were inspired to start this school in order to provide their own course correction to what they saw as like a failed system.

• 30:28Scaachi Koul?

  What was your first interaction like with them? I don't, I, I feel like that laugh is saying several things.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  It was a phone call with Mike. And at that point, he was used to so much good press that he was excited to speak with us. And it's, it's, it starts out fine. We have pretty straightforward questions. We do not lead him to believe this is going to be a positive story. In fact, the purpose of the call from the very moment we start speaking to him is, we heard a lot of things about your school. Some of these allegations are very serious. We want to go over them with you. It was important for him not to believe that The Times wanted to write this beautiful profile of him, but he continued to try to steer us in that direction. And I think things kind of went off the rails when he started to engage in a conversation with Erica about education practices and about how his school worked. I don't think he was expecting to speak with a reporter who had actually covered education

• 31:19Speaker 05

  because he hadn't up until then. He'd been speaking to national reporters on morning TV news shows, CBS This Morning, et cetera, great reporters, but none of them had expertise in education. So it was very striking when he started getting real questions back about his descriptions of what it meant to get an education at T M Landry. And the abuse too. And he stayed on with us for quite some time. He likes to talk. We got to the abuse. He did say, I, yeah, I can whip them. Yeah, sometimes I, but I don't, I don't do that anymore. But it was something bizarre like that, right, Katie? Like, he was like, that was a long time ago. He said, that was a long time ago. And the incident we'd heard about from the students when Erica spoke to them was an

• 32:04Speaker 05

  incident that had happened the year before. So when he said, but that was years ago, we were in shock because we had no idea what he was talking about. And then he said, but that student's mother told me I could. I already knew her. It was clear there was a second incident. We went back to Louisiana shortly after, and I was like, we got to get the documents on that incident. And we did. But we wouldn't have known about it if he hadn't told us. So that was our first encounter with him. And then he was just like, I've given you more than enough time. I gotta go. We were on speakerphone and we just. Like looked at each other after, after we hung up.

• 32:39Scaachi Koul?

  I mean, that sounds stupefying. So then you went to visit the school. What did it look like?

• 32:45Speaker 05

  It was an old factory. It was a couple of stories. And the first thing I noticed was that the stairwell on the outside of the building to get up to the fire escape was so rusted that I was pretty certain I was going, my body weight was going to tear from the side of the building. And then you sort of look into the windows and there were some really strange things in there, like exercise bikes, some of which didn't have seats, broken computer parts, desks that were in shaky condition. And you, you have all of these banners, the flags of different Ivy League schools and top NSKX schools just flying off the side of the building. And you're thinking to yourself, this is such a strange juxtaposition. So then you enter the building and it's

• 33:28Speaker 05

  a factory floor, which has folding tables. The building itself was really symbolic for Mike. He liked that it was broken. He wanted visitors to come in and see that his kids were so tough and had so much grit and so much drive and determination. It didn't matter that this was their environment. In fact, it was better because they didn't follow the rules. And he would say, this building is like my students. They are broken, but I love them and I'm going to save them.

• 33:59Scaachi Koul?

  That's gross. So then Mike gave you a tour. Can you describe that experience?

• 34:05Speaker 05

  When you're reporting out a story, you obviously want to talk to everyone involved. In the same way that I wanted to do several follow-ups and be exhaustive with the families. We wanted to give him the same opportunity. So we went and knocked on the door. He invited us in. He had rapidly assembled a group of students in one of the rooms. It became abundantly clear that Mike used these students as shields for various reasons. We knew that from our interviewing up until that point, that these students were pretty well-trained in being spokespeople for the school, but to put them in front of reporters, especially given that he understood, based on the questions we were asking him, like he understood what this

• 34:50Speaker 05

  story was going to be about. He knew we were investigating him for abuse and fraud and he still did this, right? So we went, you know, we went into this room and they let us ask questions and every question that we asked of them, Mike and Tracy, they had students answer. I like being on my knees. I don't think it's weird at all. You guys are here to do a bad story. You're casting everything as negative. We're a family. That's what the children were saying to us, that they loved the school. They loved Mike and Tracy. Everything that they were doing there was normal. And we were just big bad New York Times reporters who totally was getting the story wrong and were out to miscast what they're all about.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Every once in a while, like Tracy interjected to say, like, you all are saying this is strange. We are a family. Some of these children like stay the night at our house, which

• 35:48Scaachi Koul?

  That's a red flag in education, generally speaking.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  It's a red flag, right? Mike goes into the whole, you know, calling me my sister. I knew what that was all about. Staring down Katie, like they're trying to do his intimidation stuff. And at the end, there was this really dramatic moment and I forget Katie, what you asked him to made him do this, but he goes into this like very animated monologue about persecution. And we can write whatever we want to write because, you know, Jesus was persecuted. So nail me to the cross. He actually put his body in the form of a cross and put his arms out on either side of him.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's rare for a savior complex to be that on the nose. Yeah. He said, you know, write whatever you want. They did this to Jesus. And if I have to die on the cross to get these kids into college, like Asian children and white children, then so be it. It was very, very jarring. Katie and I would take turns, like if one was asking a question or engaging in a question, the other was watching the kids, just watching their facial expressions. You could tell some of them were so uncomfortable. They were nervous. I mean, I think some of them were scared. They understood that this was about to blow. They told us after they were afraid. Yeah, they were afraid, but he put them up and again, used them as shields.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  And then when we left, he put a video on Facebook of us there, thanking the New York Times for coming to check out TM Landry and boasting about our visit as if we were not about to write the story that he knew we were going.

• 37:36Scaachi Koul?

  This was one of my favorite parts of the book. I laughed out loud.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  But it was by design, right? He was just laying the foundation to either show us as being dishonest by making people think that we were going there to write a positive story and a negative one ultimately came out. Or he was just like delusional and somehow thought that he would once again be able to talk, bully his way out of a story.

• 38:04Scaachi Koul?

  One of the most shocking reveals in this story is that TM Landry was never in accredited school. And it turns out that's technically legal in the state of Louisiana because of a loophole that dates back to the fight over school segregation in the 1950s. Can you explain how that's possible?

• 38:21Speaker 05

  It's part of the legacy of the post-Reconstruction era in the state of Louisiana. After Reconstruction, as things were crumbling and white supremacists are retaking the state, are reasserting a racial hierarchy with white people at the top solidly. One of the things that they need to do is ensure that schools can stay segregated. And so they encourage segregation in the early 20th century of everything from churches to schools, politics, housing, jobs. And then as the civil rights movement starts to gain steam in the post-World War II era, where you have a push to say like, lynchings need to stop.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  All of these things that stem from segregation need to stop. There's a tremendous pressure to desegregate schools. States like Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, they pass state laws that create loopholes. And one of them is to deregulate and just say, well, if, if you're not regulated by us, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. They make loopholes for parochial academies, religious academies. Basically, they start to create categories. And in Louisiana, one of the categories is a school that is simply just not recognized by the state whatsoever. These schools don't have to give any information. They don't have to say how many students they have, what the students' names are, what they're being taught,

• 39:42Speaker 05

  what the curriculum is. It's an incredibly big loophole, but it is created in order to preserve segregation in the mid 20th century at a time when there's a lot of pressure to desegregate.

• 39:57Scaachi Koul?

  So TM Landry was operating in a legal gray area with no oversight. And that's why the Landrys were able to run the school pretty much however they wanted. And it's also why so much abuse went undetected for so long. Katie, when did that abuse begin, to your knowledge?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Not long after the school was started, there was a very startling, and I think for a lot of the students, horrifying incident of violence. And this is actually the incident that Mike leads us to. He, he accidentally tells us about, but it's a student who he feels has disobeyed him. And his response is to beat the student and drag him up a flight of stairs and continue to beat him in another room where there are even more students. The students are a variety of ages. And when you read the police report, the description of this incident, it is very, very jarring. You don't have to hit a student like that every day to make all of the students really afraid that it could happen again. So I think that there was a demonstration of volatility and violence that kept people in line.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  Nobody wanted to be the next person. And I think that we see this as another recurring theme. When Mike does not go to jail, when instead he ends up with a lesser misdemeanor violence charge, he pleads guilty to and does some anger management training. The families believe it means that he couldn't have been really done anything that wrong. So for the parents who remain, what they see is the outside world validating Mike. So that's another very powerful thing to see. And we see it again and again and again. It's like, well, if CBS This Morning is doing a segment on him, who are we to say he's doing something wrong? And the students talk about how grateful they were when they were not singled out.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Whether it was singled out violently, singled out, called names, screamed at, they just didn't want to be singled out. And then almost in an echo of what happens earlier on in the school, he attacks another student. Again, there's a police record of this where he drags him around by his hooded sweatshirt and humiliates him and physically really hurts him. And again, the students are very torn about this. They're like, we are so glad that wasn't us and we know that was exceedingly, exceedingly wrong. And actually that is sort of where you see the students start to think to themselves, what have we gotten ourselves into? They're in over their head. They know it, but they're not really sure what to do.

• 42:18Scaachi Koul?

  So we know that no state regulator is coming by to check up on the school, but all these students have families. Did the parents suspect what was happening at TM Landry?

• 42:28Speaker 05

  He tried to build this feeling not of just trust, like now we're all part of the same family. It's us against the world. We know that white America doesn't care about us. Not only did he try to say a lot of things that created this feeling of us against the world, he also would say things like, and it's just up To me, so you've got to trust me. And your kids might not always like it. You know how kids are, but look at the results. And so parents were inclined to believe that. But at the same time, that means that it's up to the kids. It's up to kids who are 14, 15, 16 years old to try to make really adult decisions about the things that they face and make choices about how to deal with their fear, their shame, their worry, and their deep desperation to go to school.

• 43:12Speaker 05

  All things that an adult should be helping them with. They are now isolated from the adults who could help them in so many ways.

• 43:19Scaachi Koul?

  Mike and Tracy founded TM Landry in 2005, and Katie didn't get her tip about this until late 2018. How are the Landrys, especially Mike, able to maintain their grip on these families for so long?

• 43:33Speaker 05

  In his leadership style, he ruled through pure adulterated fear. The mental and physical paralysis that he instilled in students. It was everything. I mean, he wanted loyalty. He liked to compare himself to like authoritarians. He really liked the idea that the students were walking around on eggshells, wondering what mood he was going to be in, who he was going to yell at. He could be in a perfectly fine mood and then just call a meeting and just berate children for hours. He called it organized chaos. It was just fear, control.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  At the end of the day, he fostered a culture of kids who really believed that they would get nowhere without him. So it was also like a culture of dependency. He became like the most important person in their lives.

• 44:34Scaachi Koul?

  Okay, so we've got a school with no real curriculum, no accreditation, and rampant abuse. And yet, these kids are getting into top-tier colleges. How did Mike and Tracy actually get those results?

• 44:46Speaker 05

  They really were able to benefit from the very intense test prep culture that has pervaded public schools in particular for forever. And so they were able to teach to the test. They practiced ACT exams every day, day in, day out. They had an English teacher who wanted the kids to read novels and talk about books. Mike would come into the middle of that class and say, that's stupid. We're not doing that. Go take an ACT. I mean, they just played the game. Test scores have always been the major lever in any college application. The rest of it is kind of just fluff.

• 45:26Scaachi Koul?

  And then how did Mike manipulate the essay portion of these college applications?

• 45:30Speaker 05

  So he had this essay writing, almost a boot camp for students who were filling out their applications, where he would gather them together and kind of rapid fire suggest narratives that he said admissions officers would really like. Poverty, drugs, homelessness, domestic violence. You needed to have endured one of these things. And he also suggested fuller storylines. He wanted them to hit certain beats around how miserable their lives were. And then the turn in the essay was always some version of, but thanks to TM Landry and thanks to education, I was able to overcome all of these really terrible things

• 46:12Speaker 05

  that you, white admissions officer, already believe that I've lived through just because you have an inherent bias against black people that you cannot articulate because you are too ashamed to articulate what you really think of me. So I am going to deliver up on a platter all the things you secretly think of me and then find a way to say that the system you believe in, education, is what saved me. Not all the students want to write these essays. Some fight back. They often lose these battles. And in one instance, a student who refuses, and he thinks that he gets his way. What the Landrys do is they say, thank you. They take the essay, but then they write him a letter of recommendation filled with these lies, saying that he was abused by his father,

• 46:56Speaker 05

  saying that, you know, he started a club for survivors of domestic violence that he never started, all the things that he had refused to write in his essay. And they just slotted it and sent it off. One of the reasons the scam works, despite the fact that Mike is not a particularly great salesman for all of this, he is selling something everybody wants. This is one of the things that one of the students says in the book. He says, Mike is not that convincing, but when you're selling something people want, they will see it and that's what they will believe. And I think that every, you know, Erica and I have listened to a lot of episodes of your show. Every scam that you go through has that at its core, right? Charlie Javas, she wasn't the best scam artist of all time, but she is saying to investors, I'm going to be a successful female founder

• 47:41Speaker 05

  in the moment Silicon Valley wants a successful female founder. In the moment that major financial institutions feel they can't keep up with Silicon Valley startups. She's there serving up what they want. Mike, he is giving these colleges something they really want. They do want diversity. They do believe that they need to be more diverse institutions. And frankly, they do need to be more diverse institutions. I would argue that relying on Mike Landry to give you students is probably not the way to do it. Yet, what he sells is so compelling, it seems to work.

• 48:16Scaachi Koul?

  So we should mention that in an interview with the New York Times, the Landrys denied having falsified transcripts and college applications. In the book, you detail how Mike claimed to have close relationships with admissions offices at some of the best schools in the United States. The colleges deny this, but what's clear is that there was a dynamic working in his favor. He's sending them exactly what they want. Students of color with incredible hardship stories and strong test scores. But at no point do any of these top-tier colleges seem to have checked that TM Landry was actually accredited. Do you feel like the colleges were willing marks here?

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. I mean, the highest echelons of the American educational hierarchy, these are institutions that were created to reproduce that hierarchy again and again and again. When you look at the history of college admissions at Ivy League schools, they were never admitting the best and the brightest. They were always admitting the richest and the whitest. That is the system they reproduced. And every time there was a moment where they're pressured to not do that, they find a loophole. And a lot of the loopholes they create for students who don't pass their exams, for students who don't get good grades. It's, we're going to have legacy admissions then. We're going to allow student athletes.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  We're going to do a personality score so that somebody who's the kid of a rich CEO can still come here. Those are all things that are later used when college admissions officials are trying to find ways to allow more black and Hispanic students, and for a while, Asian students too, into their doors. They're like, okay, well, why don't we just use the things that we were using to like let unqualified white students come in? And you see them use them. And then suddenly you see white America become really obsessed with standards, with making sure everybody's qualified, with saying we could never let anybody in who didn't hit certain metrics that had never really had to be hit before. So yes, these are willing marks. These are people who are desperately trying to change a system

• 50:19Speaker 05

  that is so ingrained and so difficult to change that they see this miracle story. And they see these kids who seem to check every box. And it feels very appealing.

• 50:33Scaachi Koul?

  The Landrys were operating a school outside of state or federal regulations, and they seem to have the backing of some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. But the families brave enough to talk to Erica and Katie painted a damning portrait of TM Landry. After the break, the story goes public and the Landrys world comes crashing down.

• 51:00Speaker 06

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• 51:30Scaachi Koul?

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• 52:15Scaachi Koul?

  For the best bingeable series like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 52:36Scaachi Koul?

  Can you guys tell me what happened when the expose in the New York Times came out? What was the reaction like? What was the ripple effect like?

• 52:43Speaker 05

  When it came out, we were just getting text after text after text. It was 5:00 in the morning, the story published. The students had all set their alarms to be up and pass it around. People were excited who had participated. There was a lot of commentary and chatter about it. But I thought that the response that I found most fascinating was the families and parents who stuck by Mike Landry. There was a recording that was sent to Erica of this meeting that happened right after the story came out, where parents talked pretty openly about why they just didn't care. Why they were like, we still believe that Mike Landry is our only chance. And said they were going to stand by him because they said, this story kind of seems to show that white America really doesn't care about us.

• 53:27Speaker 05

  Sees us as these two dimensional characters. And if you can still get our kids into college, even if it's not Yale, we're happy. And so that I found to be a really striking response and one that we tried to really draw out in the texture of the book. But then, I mean, the online response, I don't know, Erica, you're online more than I am. Yeah. Erica would send me these messages that she'd seen or something. I'd be like, oh, my God, I don't even want to see that. Yeah, no, it was a hard day. It was a hard day. I, I like hungered down and didn't like leave this office. The story was just a emotional roller coaster. And so, so the response was too. I mean, people were horrified. They were outraged, but people really rallied around the kids, which I was really worried about. That was our chief concern.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  The kids who put their faces on this thing and those of them who were in campuses, reading this from their dorm rooms and had to go out that morning and face their classmates at Wellesley and Yale. So people really rallied around the kids. It raised a lot of questions, you know, the people were like, how did the parents not know? And everyone also just was like, how did these schools not know? Right? And then there was just general, I mean, people definitely were upset. They were like, why are you writing about this guy? You're taking down this black man when white people do this all the time. It was just the gamut. It was definitely how, how dare you? But also a lot of thank yous.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  I think it came across that this was not some like GC expose that we were out to blow the lid off and, and the emails and the calls and even the angry ones, right? People understood that we did this for a reason and it was really, it was really a reckoning.

• 55:13Scaachi Koul?

  Did law enforcement get involved?

• 55:15Speaker 05

  When the story came out, they felt that there was enough in the story to reopen at least one investigation, the state and local level of physical violence and for the FBI to open up an investigation to whether or not the Landry's had somehow economically scammed these colleges.

• 55:32Scaachi Koul?

  I mostly just want to know where Mike and Tracy are. Like, where are they?

• 55:36Speaker 05

  So it's interesting. Mike and Tracy have left their home in Brobridge. They've cropped up in a couple of different places, including in Georgia, where Mike once lived. And it seems that they've remade their lives there. I saw him on TikTok. I got a TikTok video of him. He was, he's promoting a spice. He was promoting a, a hot sauce or a, or a Cajun spice. A Cajun spice at a restaurant, still hustling.

• 56:06Scaachi Koul?

  So three months after your expose on TM Landry was published, another academic scandal burst onto the scene. Operation Varsity Blues, the college admissions scandal that we've covered on this show. That story, which focused mainly on wealthy white families manipulating the system to get their children into elite institutions, was in the headlines for months and ended in convictions and jail time. Unfortunately, without sustained attention on the TM Landry story, Louisiana state investigation petered out. And then the pandemic slowed the federal investigation to a walk and then a crawl and then a whimpering end.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  I think one of the reasons why people felt so conflicted about the story itself, why people have really a range of emotions about the Landry's especially, is because this is a story that doesn't have a tidy ending. And it never will, because this is the story of these clashing forces in America around opportunity through education, around whether or not we really want to see black people in America as equal, whether we really want to give people the tools to make their lives better, or whether we want to give a tiny subset so that we can feel better about the country and, and be able to say that things like racism and classism don't exist. These are hard things to talk about.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  And unfortunately, this book is nonfiction. If we could have a tidy story, we would be giving the country the exact same story that the Landry for selling to these colleges, that all you need is to believe in the system, whether that system's law enforcement, whether that system is education, and everything will always be okay.

• 57:47Scaachi Koul?

  You continued reporting on the story for this book, but how did it feel to see the chance for any real consequences just fade away?

• 57:55Speaker 05

  We can always find a reason that seems logical for why somebody may or may not want to pursue something. But at the end of the day, I don't think we should discount the fact that this was a story of several black families that were not necessarily as empowered as they would be if they were upper middle class or rich and white. And so when law enforcement had to make its choices about what to prioritize, it did not, in the end, I think we can say prioritize them. Exactly right. That's it. I do believe that if this were a different group of families, their response would have been more swift and, and different. And so do they, which is why they were very, very happy that we did the book.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  For black families, you really do come to accept that if you're not going to have justice, you can at least try to find your own peace. And that's what they were able to do. Closure is too strong a word. I would just say they feel like they own their story again.

• 58:54Scaachi Koul?

  And for the kids who had already moved on from TM Landry, those who are at risk of losing their college educations or scholarships as a result of these revelations, what did they make of all of this?

• 59:05Speaker 05

  I think one of the things that's interesting about the period after they got into college is how much thinking they've done about this. And we really understand this through their point of view. I always say all the smart things in this book, all the revelatory moments are their thoughts and ideas. They understand this as something that's part of their lives, but it does not define them. And I think that that's really important for actually probably all young people to really understand, whether they go to college or not, that like the age between 17 and 25, that's not your whole story. Thank God.

• 59:45Scaachi Koul?

  Follow Scamfluencers on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Scamfluencers ad free by joining Audible.

• 59:54Scaachi Koul?

  For Audible Originals, this is Miracle Children: The Price of Admission for Scamfluencers. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Haggy. If you have a tip for us on a story that you think we should cover, please email us at [email protected]. Huge thanks to Erica L. Green and Katie Benner. Their book is Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises. It is truly fantastic. It's such a good read and it's out now, so go pick it up. This episode was story edited by our senior producer, Sarah Enne. Our senior producer is Ginny Bloom. Our producer is Sachi Cole. Our associate producer is Charlotte Miller. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock. Fact checking by Gabrielle Drolle. Sound design by John Lloyd.

• 1:00:39Scaachi Koul?

  Additional audio assistance provided by Augustine Lim. Our music supervisor is Scott Velazquez for Frieson Sync. The executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin. The head of Audible Originals North America is Marshall Louis. The chief content officer is Rachel Kiatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.

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