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Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
New York Times ^ | Erica L. Green and Katie Benner

Posted on 11/30/2018 4:47:21 AM PST by reaganaut1

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.

Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS Morning News.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: Louisiana
KEYWORDS: collegeadmissions; diversity; harvard; racialpreferences; tmlandry
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The average level of black academic achievement is lower than that of non-blacks, and if schools admit based on academic achievement as they should, and high schools do not commit fraud, blacks will be "under-represented" at "elite" schools. So be it. If blacks are 10% of the population, that doesn't mean we need blacks to be 10% of Harvard, just as we don't need whites and Asians to be the majority in the NFL or NBA.
1 posted on 11/30/2018 4:47:21 AM PST by reaganaut1
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To: reaganaut1

Paywall.

Can anyone give a run down on whats this about?


2 posted on 11/30/2018 4:51:33 AM PST by lowbridge
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To: lowbridge

Copy the headline, open a new window, go to Google, paste the headline into the search field. Then, click on the top hit. That will get you past the paywall.


3 posted on 11/30/2018 4:54:45 AM PST by RegulatorCountry
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To: lowbridge

Try this

https://outline.com/


4 posted on 11/30/2018 4:55:39 AM PST by CaptainK ('No collusion, no obstruction, he's a leaker')
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To: lowbridge

A tip:

To get around the paywall, I copied and pasted the article’s title into my browser to access it directly.

See if it works for you.


5 posted on 11/30/2018 4:55:43 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia (Democrats: The perfect party for the helpless and stupid, and those who would rule over them.)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

If the TIMES is reporting on it, it’s probably a veiled slam at charter schools. (my guess)


6 posted on 11/30/2018 5:03:39 AM PST by CondorFlight
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To: RegulatorCountry

F Google. You can do it without going through those bastards.


7 posted on 11/30/2018 5:12:57 AM PST by gibsonguy
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To: lowbridge

The next three paragraphs:

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.

The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.

The colleges “want to be able to get behind the black kids going off and succeeding, and going to all of these schools,” said Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at N.Y.U. He said that Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application.


8 posted on 11/30/2018 5:14:23 AM PST by Yo-Yo (Is the /sarc tag really necessary?)
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To: reaganaut1

A version of Scott’s Tot’s from the show the OFFICE!


9 posted on 11/30/2018 5:19:43 AM PST by LeonardFMason (426)
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To: reaganaut1

Amazing, sad article. Even more amazing that the New York Times published it.


10 posted on 11/30/2018 5:20:43 AM PST by Captain Rhino (Determined effort today forges tomorrow.)
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To: gibsonguy

I rather enjoy screwing over Google to screw over the New York Times, personally. Speak for yourself.


11 posted on 11/30/2018 5:21:40 AM PST by RegulatorCountry
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To: Yo-Yo
sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity

So basically a scam artist found a way to mine liberal PC guilt and gullibility.
12 posted on 11/30/2018 5:25:48 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia (Democrats: The perfect party for the helpless and stupid, and those who would rule over them.)
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To: reaganaut1

The great liberal push through from early education to college and then to affirmative action in the work place. Who is the loser? The company that hires and now cant fire, that’s who!


13 posted on 11/30/2018 5:26:39 AM PST by ronnie raygun
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

...not that that’s hard to do...Fauxahantas -Elizabeth Warren-started scamming Harvard in 1995 and STILL holds a Chair there

If anything the NYT is steaming pissed Landry was so gross about it


14 posted on 11/30/2018 5:30:53 AM PST by mo ("If you understand, no explanation is needed; if you don't understand, no explanation is possible")
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To: reaganaut1

translation: Elite colleges snap-up these kids in order to virtue signal their diversity when in reality they aren’t prepared for the academic rigors. The schools can’t admit that either so they just rubber-stamp their degrees.

The truth hurts.


15 posted on 11/30/2018 5:34:32 AM PST by Buckeye McFrog
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To: reaganaut1

Very pro 2 min video promo of the school:

https://vimeo.com/222423241


16 posted on 11/30/2018 5:36:01 AM PST by gaijin
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To: Yo-Yo

“Ivy League schools hungry for diversity”

There’s the problem. if these “elite schools” would stop the hunger for diversity and perversity, and instead stick to rewarding color blind excellence, they would not be such a laughingstock.


17 posted on 11/30/2018 5:54:27 AM PST by SharpRightTurn (Chuck Schumer--giving pond scum everywhere a bad name.)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

Proof positive - the article states that a teacher referenced the WRONG STUDENT NAME twice in her recommendation letter to the college - and apparently, not even the college noticed these errors!

This guy mined liberal PC guilt, is mining the black “unity” angle and has BRAINWASHED way too many children in that community!

This is SAD!!


18 posted on 11/30/2018 6:04:08 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Diversity is tolerance; diverse points of views will not be tolerated!)
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To: reaganaut1

ANOTHER liberal scammer in the name of ‘diversity’


19 posted on 11/30/2018 6:07:18 AM PST by Mr. K (No consequence of repealing Obamacare is worse than Obamacare itself.)
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To: SharpRightTurn
There’s the problem. if these “elite schools” would stop the hunger for diversity and perversity, and instead stick to rewarding color blind excellence, they would not be such a laughingstock.

DING! DING! DING!

We have a winner!!

The Liberal PC crowd has convinced over half of America that we must diversify and be all accepting in order to make the world a better place...sorry, accepting the best person for the task is how you make the world a better place! Nothing more and nothing less!
20 posted on 11/30/2018 6:07:31 AM PST by ExTxMarine (Diversity is tolerance; diverse points of views will not be tolerated!)
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