A riveting investigation into a school, a scam, and a notorious college admissions scandal that exposes the inequalities and racial segregation of American education, from two award-winning New York Times journalists

T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, boasted a 100-percent college acceptance rate, placing students at nearly every Ivy League college in the country. The spectacle of Landry students opening their acceptance letters to Harvard and Stanford was broadcast on CBS This Morning, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Today, and even celebrated by Michelle Obama. It was a ritual to watch the miraculous success of these youngsters—miraculous because Breaux Bridge is one of the poorest counties in the country, ranked close to the bottom for test scores and high school graduation. T.M. Landry was said to be “minting prodigies,” and the prodigies were often Black.

How did the school do it? They didn’t—it was a scam, pulled off with fake records and fake letters of recommendation, and above all, personal essays telling fake stories of triumph over adversity. Worse: Landry’s success concealed a nightmare of abuse and coercion. In a years-long investigation, Katie Benner and Erica L. Green explored the students, the school, the town, and Ivy League admissions to understand why Black students were pressured to trade a racial stereotype of hardship for opportunity.

Gripping and illuminating, Miracle Children argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system, but that it played by the rules, enabled by segregated schools, inequitable education and belief that elite colleges are the nation’s last path to life-changing economic opportunity.