The T.M. Landry Scandal: How a Louisiana School Faked Its Way Into the Ivy League

Summary

Gone South S5, Ep. "The T.M. Landry Scandal: How a Louisiana School Faked Its Way Into the Ivy League"

Host: Jed Lipinski
Guests: Erica Green and Katie Benner (New York Times reporters)
Date: April 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Gone South pivots from its traditional focus on conventional crime stories to explore an “educational scandal” that shook the American South and reverberated across the U.S. The episode investigates the meteoric rise and stunning fall of T.M. Landry College Prep, a tiny, unconventional Louisiana school whose viral student acceptance videos catapulted its students to Ivy League universities—and later unleashed a torrent of troubling revelations. Through interviews with the New York Times reporters who broke the scandal, former students, and parents, host Jed Lipinski examines the myths, power structures, and systemic inequities in American education that enabled the Landrys’ fraud to flourish and interrogates the ambiguous morality at its core.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Viral Origin Story: T.M. Landry’s Rise

• Viral Video Breakthrough: In 2016, a video of a T.M. Landry student’s euphoric acceptance to Cornell went viral, followed by even bigger moments when brothers Alex and Ayrton Little were accepted to Stanford and Harvard (02:28–03:31).

• Celebrity endorsements followed: Michelle Obama celebrated the students, and press coverage cast T.M. Landry as an underdog, “miracle-making” school.

  “These kids won’t let anything stand in their way.”
  – Michelle Obama, cited by Jed Lipinski (03:10)

  “Awesome story of someone chasing their dreams.”
  – Jeremy Lin, cited by Jed Lipinski (03:15)

National Attention, Unspoken Skepticism

• Initial Reaction: Even expert education reporters Erica Green and Katie Benner initially took the success at face value.

• Reservations: Benner notes the need for broader equality, not just exceptional stories:

  “We’ll know that there’s equality when we don’t have to have a big to do every time somebody who’s black gets into Harvard, when it’s normative…”
  – Katie Benner (04:45)

The Tip-off: Suspicion and Early Red Flags

• 2018 Tip: Katie Benner receives a tip from a Texas attorney who suspects “shady” admissions practices and cult-like leadership (05:03–06:18).
• Founders’ Background: Mike and Tracy Landry, both from marginalized backgrounds, presented themselves as models of perseverance. Their personal stories resonated with local black families who faced decades of low educational expectations (07:13–09:39).

The “Mastery” Facade and Control

• School Evolution: Started as a kitchen-table homeschool, organically growing as neighborhood parents observed academic gains in the Landrys' children (10:03–10:16).

• Opaque Methods: Details of the “mastery technique” were vague. Parents were explicitly told not to ask about or discuss education with their children.

  “Feed your children, clothe your children, and do not ever talk to them about education.”
  – Mike Landry as recalled by Erica Green (13:32)

Discipline and Abuse Allegations

• Corporal Punishment Incident (2012): Reports emerge of a child returning home with neck bruises. The school, unaccredited and outside the public system, faces almost no oversight or formal recourse (18:12–20:13).
• Parental Confusion: Mike claims parental consent for punishment; the community fractures over loyalty and concern (20:24).

The Growth of a “Feeder” School

• Strategic Networking: Mike cultivates relationships with Ivy League admissions officers, attending prestigious summer counselor programs and dazzling them with charisma (24:23–25:59).
• Pipeline Status: T.M. Landry quickly becomes known nationally as a “miracle” feeder school (25:59).

The Real Academic Strategy: Test Prep and “Miracle Narratives”

• What Actually Happened in Class: “Mastery learning” was mostly intensive ACT test prep, online modules, and solitary work—far from the collaborative environment promised (22:34–23:01).

• Fabricated Trauma: Mike and Tracy pressure students to write personal essays about poverty and hardship, often dictating or inventing stories for strategic effect.

  “It wasn’t about constructing a proper grammatically correct sentence. It was about whether it was heartbreaking enough or provocative enough.”
  – Erica Green (24:01)

• Falsified Applications: Clubs, grades, honors, even athletic achievements—completely invented. Students themselves rarely saw the applications (31:29–32:56).

  “He called one student a baseball MVP even though T.M. Landry had no athletic teams.”
  – Jed Lipinski (31:47)

  “They did not conceive of a world where an entire school could be built on the idea of lying about the information on a college application.”
  – Katie Benner (32:56)

Exploiting—and Exposing—Systemic Flaws

• Media Spotlight and Parent Backlash: After the Littles’ CBS/Ellen appearance, parents note stories of “near homelessness” and straight As that simply weren’t true. Parents finally begin to question the “no questions” rule, triggering collective doubt (33:33–34:59).
• Culture of Retaliation: Reports surface of abuse, him “forcing kids to kneel,” fabricated extracurriculars, and the hollow nature of T.M. Landry’s academic claims.

Who’s the Villain? Systemic Critique and Community Division

• Ambiguous Blame: Listeners are left to question whether Mike Landry is a unique villain or merely a manipulator of a system already stacked for the privileged.

• Racial Tensions: Some community members lash out at the exposé, asking how reporters could “do this to a black man” rather than focusing on the black children harmed (36:46).

  “No one was asking, like, how he could do this to their black children. It was one of the toughest stories I’ve ever done in my 17 year career.”
  – Erica Green (36:55)

• Varsity Blues Parallel: The T.M. Landry story is quickly eclipsed by the “Varsity Blues” scandal, which reveals that wealthy white families had long used money and connections to cheat the system at scale (38:07).

Aftermath and Unsettled Endings

• Accountability Gaps: Despite state and federal reviews, no criminal charges or enforced closure follow. The school slowly collapses post-scandal, returning to the Landrys’ house before dissolving entirely (39:08–40:44).
• Mike and Tracy’s Fate: The Landrys leave the area; current whereabouts unknown.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Impossible Expectations:

  “Every year the test scores came out … New Orleans and some district in Mississippi were always battling it out for the bottom.”
  – Erica Green (04:15)

• On Faked Resumes:

  “He claimed another student earned high honors in a Math Olympiad. That, according to the student, never happened.”
  – Jed Lipinski (31:49)

• On Systemic Loopholes:

  “They did not conceive of a world where an entire school could be built on the idea of lying about the information on a college application.”
  – Katie Benner (32:56)

• On Hard Questions:

  “Was the villain Mike Landry or the higher education system that made his pitch so easy to sell?”
  – Jed Lipinski (37:15)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Viral Origins and the Rise: 02:28–05:03
• First Tip and Reporters Begin Investigating: 05:03–06:18
• The Founders' Backstory: 07:13–09:16
• Opaque Methods and Parental Exclusion: 13:32–13:55
• Pattern of Abuse Emerges: 18:12–20:46
• Networking with College Officials: 24:23–25:59
• Test Prep and Fabricated Trauma: 22:34–24:23
• Fake Clubs & Transcript Details: 31:29–32:56
• National Exposure and Parent Backlash: 33:33–34:59
• Aftermath and School Closure: 39:08–40:44

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Tone and Style

The episode’s tone is investigative but empathetic, blending narrative journalism with deep systemic critique. The voices of journalists, parents, and students are treated with nuance and care, highlighting not just the scandal itself but the broader societal factors—racial inequality, the fetishization of “miracle” stories, and the flaws within elite college admissions—that made the fraud both possible and fraught.

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Summary

This episode peels back layers of inspiration, desperation, exploitation, and systemic complicity in the T.M. Landry scandal. By following the journey of two reporters from initial awe to dogged investigation, listeners see how easy it is for compelling stories—especially those wrapped in hardship and uplift—to seduce even experienced journalists and admissions officers. In the end, the episode forces a reckoning with not just the actions of individuals but with the larger, enduring inequalities of American education and opportunity.

Transcript

[Jed Lipinski]

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[Jed Lipinski]

In December of 2016, a video from a tiny high school in Bro Bridge, Louisiana went viral. It captured the explosive reaction from a room full of black students after one of their classmates learned he'd just been accepted into Cornell.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yes,

[Jed Lipinski]

A year later, a pair of videos from the same school Got even more attention. These showed what happened after two brothers, Alex and Ayrton Little, were accepted into Stanford and Harvard, respectively. Ayrton was only 16, which made the story that much more inspiring. Here's how it sounded in the room. View Update. Ayrton's video got more than 8 million views on YouTube alone. Michelle Obama shared one of his social posts, saying, these kids won't let anything stand in their way. Jeremy Lin, the NBA star and a Harvard alumnus, wrote, awesome story of someone chasing their dreams, pursuing their education, and turning a blind eye to the haters. National outlets covered the story. The school known as TM Landry was hailed for turning its tiny campus in rural Louisiana, with a graduating class of just 16 students into a pipeline for elite universities. Erica Green and Katie Benner are reporters for the New York Times. They both watched and shared the videos when they came out. Erica had been an education reporter for years, starting at the Baltimore Sun. She understood what a big deal this was for a school in Louisiana.

[Erica Green]

Every year the test scores came out, and we would always look to see where New Orleans fell because it would be like Baltimore. New Orleans and some district in Mississippi were always kind of battling it out for the bottom, to be honest. So I just knew that, like, for Louisiana, it was a huge achievement.

[Jed Lipinski]

Katie, an investigative reporter who covered the Justice Department, remembers celebrating the posts but also seeing them as a sign of how far the country still had to go.

[Katie Benner]

And I have this back and forth with my friend Sabrina where I said, these are really cool, but, you know, we'll know that there's equality when we don't have to have a big to do every time somebody who's black gets into Harvard, when it's normative, as opposed to when it's this extraordinary thing.

[Jed Lipinski]

Based on the videos, Katie and Erica didn't think anything was amiss about T.M. landry. They were both just happy these kids were getting into their dream schools. But a few months later, Katie got a disturbing phone call. The caller was an attorney in Texas. She told Katie she'd met with families connected to T.M. landry. She believed the school was doing something shady to get students into top colleges and that the man who ran it acted less like an educator and more like a cult leader. The viral videos had suggested a simple and inspiring story, one about underprivileged black children who, through grit and determination, had overcome the odds and earned a ticket to the American dream. But as Katie and Erica were about to learn, the story was a lot more complicated than that. Jed, I'm Jed Lipinski. This is gone south.

[Narrator/Host]

New York Times reporter Katie Benner got the tip about the T.M. landry School in October of 2018. The tipster was a former prosecutor, and she believed that a federal crime may have been committed, but she thought it deserved more scrutiny. First, here's Katie.

[Katie Benner]

So, of course, the first person I called after getting off the phone with her was Erica, this amazing education reporter, who I thought was a fantastic person and had just so much more knowledge than I did about what was going on in education.

[Narrator/Host]

Katie and Erica agreed to partner on the story. After speaking with the attorney, they got in touch with students and family members connected to the school. They eventually traveled to Louisiana to interview them in person. Within just a few days, they were able to reconstruct the rise and fall of T.M. landry. One of the first things Katie and Erica learned is why parents and students were drawn to the school in the first place. T.M. landry was short for Tracy and Mike Landry, the couple who founded it back in 2005. The two seemed to personify the kind of students they hoped to produce.

[Katie Benner]

They'd both grown up in a neighborhood in Brobridge, Louisiana, which is in many ways a beautiful town. It's in the heart of Cajun country, But they grew up in an area called the Back of the Tracks. As you can imagine, it's between the railroad tracks and the swamp, and it's a place that was one of the least integrated parts of the town.

[Narrator/Host]

In Mike's public statements, which Katie and Erica reviewed, he presented his life as an example of triumph over adversity. His mother had him at age 15 and struggled with alcohol abuse and unemployment. His brother Marcus was murdered in 1995 in what police said was a drug deal gone wrong. Tracy, meanwhile, spoke openly about her mother not being able to read and finding it hard to hold down jobs because of it.

[Katie Benner]

And both of them talk about how they found a way out of this situation because of school. They both did well enough in high school to go to college. They had teachers who believed in them, and then through that, they were able to get their bachelor's degrees. Tracy becomes a nurse, and Mike goes on to have a career, as he tells it, in finance, and then finally in education, a topic he feels passionately about.

[Narrator/Host]

Mike and Tracy did, in fact, graduate from college, and Tracy did become a nurse. But there's no evidence Mike ever worked in finance. It was one of many things that Mike seems to have made up to build his authority. But the parents Katie and Erica spoke to only knew What Mike told them they'd entrusted their kids to Mike and Tracy for years. In some cases close to a decade. Here's Erica.

[Erica Green]

You know, by the time we got to them, they were still trying to figure out who Mike and Tracy were.

[Narrator/Host]

As Mike and Tracy told parents, the school started at their kitchen table with their own children. They'd been concerned that their son was not reading at grade level. But when they'd raised those concerns during a parent teacher conference, they were told essentially, don't worry about it. He's doing fine.

[Erica Green]

They were really put off by that response. They felt it was pretty emblematic of how the public school system set very little expectations for children, especially black children, to not only succeed, but thrive. And they decided in that moment that they were going to pull their children out and do it themselves.

[Narrator/Host]

For a lot of local parents of black students, Mike and Tracy's story felt familiar. They'd watch their kids move through schools where the expectations just seemed lower. And that didn't feel accidental. It felt tied to a much longer history of who in this country was encouraged to learn and who wasn't. The parents were also inspired by how well the Landry kids seemed to be doing.

[Erica Green]

They started to show real, like, academic acumen, and people in the neighborhood saw that and wanted that for their own children. And they started to send their children to Tracy and Mike's house.

[Narrator/Host]

For the first seven years, the school

[Jed Lipinski]

didn't have a name.

[Narrator/Host]

It was more of a homeschool and tutoring program. It grew by word of mouth, with one parent telling another, but they eventually outgrew the Landry's kitchen and moved into a small four room building in downtown Brobridge. By the early 2010s, T.M. landry had its first graduating class, and they were getting results. Several grads got into strong colleges. Mike began promoting a 100% college acceptance rate. How Mike and Tracy were achieving those results was, for a lot of parents, not exactly clear. Many of them couldn't describe what day to day learning at the school actually looked like. And former students said that was by design. Mike told kids not to talk about school with their parents. What Mike did say was that the school practiced something called the mastery technique. Students didn't just skim subjects, he said. They learned them deeply and moved on only once they'd mastered the material. Students also learned from one another, Mike said, with older and more advanced kids teaching the younger ones, if you really understood something, Mike believed you should be able to teach it to the kid next to you.

[Jed Lipinski]

T.M.

[Narrator/Host]

landry was a different kind of school, in other words. But it was just one of many schools across the country experimenting with alternatives to the traditional public school model. Charter schools, which are publicly funded but run outside the usual district rules, grew from 400,000 students in 2000 to over 3 million by 2017. At the same time, America's higher education system was going through its own transformation.

[Katie Benner]

You have the most elite colleges in America trying to transform themselves painfully so, from extremely elite institutions that only want to preserve a system that prioritizes and rewards white men.

[Narrator/Host]

For a long time, elite college admissions wasn't built to find the best students in some neutral way. It was built, in essence, to admit rich white men. By the 2000s, though, colleges across the country were facing pressure to diversify their student bodies. One way admissions officials tried to do that was by getting to know high schools.

[Katie Benner]

There's so many students in this country, it's so hard to figure out who's deserving. But they believed in administrators at different high schools could help them find their way. Whether it's inner city high schools, whether it's prep schools, they can help them identify the best students. So for these college administrators and admissions officials to stumble upon somebody like Mike Landry, passionate educator, somebody who speaks truth to power around questions of race, who is producing these extraordinarily bright, capable students, these miracle students, they're like, this is our pipeline.

[Jed Lipinski]

In 2013, TM Landry celebrated its first Ivy League acceptance when a graduate got into Brown. The news swept through Brobridge and beyond. More families enrolled, hoping Mike could get their kids into a top college, too. But enrolling at TM Landry meant playing by Mike Landry's rules.

[Erica Green]

You know when you say, subscribe to the TM Landry way, you're in. If you're in, you're in. If you're not, you're not. And that starts from the very first meeting when Mike Landry tells you, feed your children, clothe your children, and do not ever talk to them about education. You know, he was very upfront about that. Many of them were very taken aback by that.

[Jed Lipinski]

In retrospect, there were other red flags. Students often stayed at school until well after dark. Mike sometimes called them in the middle of the night. Students were told to cut ties with their friends outside of school. But many students and parents saw this as the price they had to pay for gaining admission to a top college. They were willing to follow Mike wherever he wanted to go. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how much easier life feels when your wardrobe just works when you've got pieces that are comfortable, versatile and still make you feel pulled together without having to plan it out too much. That's where Quint's has really been a game changer for me. Their spring staples make getting dressed feel simple again. I'm talking about 100% European linen shorts and shirts starting around 30 $34. Their 100% Pima cotton tees are another favorite. Super soft, really clean and fit and just an instant upgrade from basic basics. And even their pants have that same feel. Relaxed comfort but still tailored enough to wear out and about without thinking twice. What really surprised me is the quality for the price. Everything is typically 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. I recently added a linen shirt to my rotation and it's become one of those items I keep reaching for. It just looks good every time. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quints.com gonesouth for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com,GoneSouth for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com,Esouth as part of the Gone south community, you know that reexamining stories we inherit can change the way we see both the past and the present. And the same is true for the stories passed down in our families. That's where the new podcast Family Lore begins. Each episode opens with a family legend, a grandfather who claimed to have flown before the Wright brothers, A great uncle tied to the killing of a Texas ranching heir. Stories passed down through generations long believed rarely questioned. Family Lore gently pulls at the edges, not to tear those stories apart, but to understand them and to uncover the histories that may have been lost along the way. Family Lore is available now wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're curious, stay with us. There's a preview waiting at the end of this episode.

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[Jed Lipinski]

As we've said, T.M. landry was unconventional. Mike Landry demanded total commitment from his students, and a lot of parents bought in, seeing it as a route to their child's academic and career success. Things that read like red flags now could look in the moment like tough love. But as reporters Katie Benner and Erica Greene dug into the history of T.M. landry, they found another early warning sign. It happened not long after the school relocated from the Landry's house to a building in downtown Brobridge.

[Katie Benner]

Everything seems to be going fine, but they're not there long. When that summer, there is an incident that really could have shut down Tam Landry. And it's only because of luck that they don't get shut down.

[Jed Lipinski]

One thing parents accepted about TM Landry was that Mike engaged in a certain amount of corporal punishment, which, as Katie points out, was not unheard of in schools in the south or other parts of the country.

[Katie Benner]

Nobody really thinks this is a big deal until one day in the summer of 2012, a parent calls the police because her child has come home with what she considers to be fairly serious injuries, bruises, lacerations around his neck. He is afraid to go to school. And as she interrogates him, he starts telling her things that she was not aware of, about the way that Mike disciplines students. And in his telling, Mike is using a certain level of fear and violence to keep students under control.

[Jed Lipinski]

The police interviewed the student and a few of his classmates who, who talked about the violence they'd seen. At a traditional school, behavior like this would have triggered complaints, investigations, and probably firings. But again, T.M. landry wasn't a traditional school. It was unaccredited, meaning it operated outside the public system with no school board or state education oversight. As Katie puts it, T.M. landry was a non school school. If families wanted someone to intervene, they had no superintendent to call. If they had a complaint, they had to treat it like consumer fraud or make a much more serious allegation that could bring in law enforcement, really, because

[Katie Benner]

it's basically a non school school. The students would have had to complain to maybe the attorney general about getting a faulty product, that their educational product was faulty, or they would have had to make a compelling case that might was abusing them so that he could be arrested for child abuse.

[Jed Lipinski]

These weren't things other TM Landry parents were ready or willing to do, Partly because many of them weren't sure what really happened between Mike and the student. Mike claimed it was all a misunderstanding.

[Katie Benner]

Mike told them that the parent who had made this complaint had specifically told him to punish her son using violence, spankings, et cetera, and that now she just simply regretted it. Told other people she was jealous of T.M. landry. She wanted to bring the school down, that these were all lies. So people were really torn about who to believe.

[Jed Lipinski]

And so in the end, nothing happened. The few students and parents who'd complained about the violence left and the others stayed. Mike and his wife continued running TM Landry as they had before. Still, the incident put the school on the local police's radar.

[Katie Benner]

The police department is down the end of the block. If anybody called the cops, they'd be there in however long it takes you to run down a small town block. And so, you know, it really looks like, if nothing else, Mike and Tracy are going to come under tremendous scrutiny. And it just so happens that Mike has run into somebody who wants to be a benefactor who kind of swoops in and saves them.

[Jed Lipinski]

The benefactor was a wealthy former NFL player who'd moved back to Breaubridge after his career ended up. He believed in Mike Landry and the school's mission. He gave them enough money to relocate to a larger space outside town and away from the prying eyes of the cops. The player enrolled his own kids at TM Landry. His wife even started working there as a teacher.

[Erica Green]

That is a huge signal to other parents that he's trusted that they might also want to work in the school, that it's not just a place for their kids, it might be a place for them.

[Jed Lipinski]

As more students enrolled, more tuition dollars poured in and graduates continued getting into good schools. Places like Boston University, Tulane, and nyu. To many parents, Mike's faith in the so called mastery technique seemed to be paying off. But how was Mike actually getting students into these schools? And what was really going on in the classroom? When Katie and Erica posed these questions to students years later, the students admitted that the mastery technique was basically a front for a very different teaching strategy.

[Erica Green]

Mastery learning, organized chaos, critical thinking, all of that was a complete cover for test prep, test prep and test prep. So the mastery learning was totally one dimensional. It was to master how to get the highest score on this exam that would get them into college.

[Jed Lipinski]

When they weren't drilling for the act. Former students described long stretches of online learning and working through assignments on their own. It was nothing like the collaborative teacher driven environment TM Landry advertised for juniors and seniors. The other top priority was the personal essay, the story they'd submit with their college applications. As Katie and Erica would later write in Miracle Children, their book about the T.M. landry scandal, Mike and Tracy understood that their applicants would be most appealing if they were both academically excellent and had overcome a stereotypical narrative of black hardship. As Katie and Erica wrote, such stories made elite institutions feel as if they were repairing something they'd had a hand in breaking, closing the gap they'd helped create. Students wrote and rewrote personal essays that in many cases were dictated by Mike and Tracy. Those essays often emphasized poverty and trauma the students hadn't actually lived through.

[Erica Green]

When Tracy was teaching so called grammar and English. It wasn't about, you know, constructing a proper grammatically correct sentence. It was about the contents of that sentence and whether it was heartbreaking enough or whether it was provocative enough.

[Jed Lipinski]

Still, good ACT scores and heartbreaking personal essays were only part of T.M. landry's recipe for success. The other key ingredient, perhaps the most important one, was the relationships Mike Landry forged with admissions officials.

[Katie Benner]

We haven't really talked about how charming he can be. He wears extremely ostentatious clothing. He loves to wear bright argylle outfits in yellow and red and lime green. He likes to dance.

[Jed Lipinski]

Mike and Tracy would put on a show at college admissions fairs. Mike made a point of befriending admissions officials and positioned himself as someone who could deliver miracle applicants.

[Katie Benner]

And one of the moments when they really become in with these admissions officials is when they meet an official at Brown who takes a liking to Mike and Tracy, who eventually recommends that they go to this program at Harvard University. It's a summer program for college admissions counselors where they will meet top admissions people from all of the most important colleges in the country. And they have this moment to really wow them, and they do. Mike tells his personal tale, and it is a really, really interesting personal story. He grows up. He comes up from nothing. He becomes a teacher because he believes education can still save lives. If you're a college admissions official, this is what you want to hear. He's fun, he's dancing, he's wearing these crazy clothes. He gets a special award at the end of his first visit for best dressed. You know, like they love him there. And by loving him, they love his students.

[Jed Lipinski]

The connections Mike made with admissions officials transformed T.M. landry into what's known as a feeder school, a place colleges came to expect a steady stream of applicants. Students had already been getting into strong schools, but Mike's relationship with Ivy League admissions offices took it to another level. Soon, some Ivies were admitting multiple T.M. landry students a year. This would put T.M. landry in the national spotlight, but it would also plant the seeds of its downfall.

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[Jed Lipinski]

One of T.M. landry's most effective recruiting tools were the acceptance videos. Clips of students opening decisions, the room exploding, the whole thing posted online. With each new round of wins, the story got bigger. And so did Mike's ambitions.

[Erica Green]

Once he secured multiple acceptances, he just wanted more. He wanted, you know, it went from just one to maybe all four students to we must sweep the Ivies. And then he wanted multiple years of the same ivy.

[Jed Lipinski]

The Landrys wanted a bigger building, more polished videos, better school uniforms. To get these things, Katie and Erica said the Landrys believed they needed higher caliber students, kids who were already destined for success.

[Erica Green]

They wanted students who were in their junior and senior year of high school at other schools. At premier private schools, they prided Themselves on being able to lure those students away and wanted to lure more and more of them away. And you saw their mission just change from we're trying to find, you know, the lower performing students, those who have been written off, those who everyone has cast aside as unteachable, who are never going to make it out of Louisiana, to then looking for a student on their way with one foot out the door of Louisiana whose parents did have means.

[Jed Lipinski]

TM Landry had begun as a school for relatively low income black students. But as the hype grew, former students said Mike and Tracy started recruiting beyond that, including white students and kids whose parents were doctors or lawyers. Students also told Katie and Erica that as the school's profile rose, Mike's behavior changed. He became erratic, violent, and self interested. He seemed more focused on his own financial success than the success of even his highest performing students. And yet, for the most part, students bought into T.M. landry's mission. They came to share Mike's belief that as predominantly black students from southwest Louisiana, the system was rigged against them. Students told Katie and Erica they knew they were crossing lines by fabricating parts of personal essays, for example. But Mike's argument was always the wealthy white families had been gaming elite emissions for generations. In his view, they weren't cheating, they were fighting back. But there was another reason many students stuck around. And that was because they believed Mike held the key to their future.

[Erica Green]

We have to remember, it wasn't just the compilation of the application material that he held over them. It was also these connections. Right? So even those who believed in what he said about how the cards were stacked against them, those who wanted to push back also believed that he could call an admissions counselor or a dean at a school and have everything taken away from them, no matter what they put on their applications. Right? Like that. He was the way that he was the gatekeeper. And not even these admissions counselors.

[Jed Lipinski]

Now, at this point in the story, you might have a few questions. As I've said, Mike ensured that T.M. landry applicants got good ACT scores and wrote compelling personal essays. He also befriended admissions officials. But was that enough? What about things like grades and extracurriculars, which play a big role in whether a kid gets into college? And didn't students admit to spending their days doing online learning instead of taking actual classes? Katie and Erica had the same questions. The answer, they learned, was that Mike simply lied over and over again in students college applications. Students never actually saw the applications that Mike sent out. But in their reporting, Katie and Erica got access to them. And they realized much of the information they contained was made up. For example, Mike told colleges that students took part in non existent clubs for survivors of abuse and drug addiction. He called one student a baseball MVP even though TM Landry had no athletic teams. He claimed another student earned high honors in a Math Olympiad. That, according to the student, never happened. In reading through the personal essays, Katie and Erica noticed that many of them contained similar details. Tragic storylines involving poverty, death and drug exposure were reused and recycled from year to year. Admissions offices just hadn't noticed.

[Katie Benner]

Keep in mind, though, that when you're an admissions officer, you are not personally reading every single TM Landry application every year. In fact, you might not know that somebody from T.M. landry has applied because you're reading your pile of applications and admissions officials. While they know that there are some students individually who might lie and make up stories, this is a trust exercise. They did not conceive of a world where an entire school could be built on the idea of lying about the information on a college application.

[Jed Lipinski]

The turning point for T.M. landry finally came in December 2017, when the school produced a set of viral videos. They'd made plenty of acceptance videos before, but none had broken through like these. As we mentioned earlier, the videos captured the wild reaction when two brothers at the school learned they'd gotten into Harvard and Stanford. National media appearances followed. The next month, the brothers appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show, beaming in their Harvard and Stanford sweatshirts.

[Interviewer]

Your story is. I mean, 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.

[Jed Lipinski]

TM Landry parents tuned in for the show, but what they saw surprised them. The segment suggested the Littles had been on the verge of homelessness for most of their lives. But this didn't square with what the parents knew about the Little family. They weren't rich, but they definitely weren't destitute. Also, the Littles mentioned getting straight A's in high school, but that wasn't true either.

[Interviewer]

And through all of this, you maintained the highest GPAs in your class. That is amazing.

[Erica Green]

There was no way that they could have straight A's because TM Landry didn't have grades, right? But they had just told Ellen this, and everyone felt very exposed. People were angry, and it made people wonder what else about the school was not true or what else Mike and Tracy were telling the world that was not true.

[Jed Lipinski]

Up to that point, most parents had gone along with Mike's rule, don't question the program and don't press your kids for details. And most kids had played along. But after the Little's appearance on Ellen, the silence started to crack. Parents began asking questions their kids had been trained not to answer. What they heard matched what Katie and Erica would later hear from the kids themselves. They learned about the school's culture of retaliation and abuse, in which kids were often forced to kneel before Mike when they got in trouble. They learned about the non existent clubs and after school activities. They learned that the Mastery technique looked more like ACT drills and online courses. Parents reached out to friends for help, which led them to an attorney in Texas. With the parents consent, that attorney contacted Katie Benner at the New York Times. Which brings us back to where we started. After interviewing parents and students at TM Landry, Katie and Erica talked to Mike. In a two hour phone interview, Mike defended himself and the school. As they would later write in Miracle Children, Mike, Mike denied ever harming students or telling them to lie on their college applications. He dismissed the idea that the school was little more than an act boot camp. In November 2018, Katie and Erica's investigation of TM Landry ran on the front page of the New York Times. The response was immediate and mixed. Many readers were shocked by what they reported, but others were angry they'd written the story at all. They accused them of tearing down a black educator who'd become a symbol of possibility for a small Louisiana town. Erica, who's black, was surprised by the reactions.

[Erica Green]

There was this question of, like, how could you do this to a black man? And that was very upsetting for the families because no one was asking, like, how he could do this to their black children. It was one of the toughest stories I've ever done in my 17 year career. And it left people feeling really complicated after you got past the abuse, which was again, horrifying, like no one quite knew who the villain was.

[Jed Lipinski]

Was the villain Mike Landry or the higher education system that made his pitch so easy to sell? Was it the college admissions culture which rewards a compelling personal story? And was Mike Landry really at fault for exploiting a system that wealthy white people had exploited since the dawn of American higher education? These, in the end, were the big questions that the T.M. landry story opened up. Who or what was the bigger villain here? A few months after the TM Landry story broke, it was eclipsed by a much bigger higher ed scandal. A federal investigation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues exposed how a group of wealthy, mostly White families paid millions in bribes to rig test scores and fake athletic credentials and buy their kids spots at elite universities.

[Erica Green]

Our story comes out and it's just like, oh my God, how horrifying that this school falsified transcripts and made up clubs. And this is so terrible. And then a month later, what is exposed is like legacy admissions and white families and wealthy families who have been doing this for generations. So those are part of the rules too, right? That have been created by institutions in this country that have historically shut black and low income students out.

[Jed Lipinski]

So what happened to T.M. landry after the Times story came out? According to Katie, it stayed open for a little while.

[Katie Benner]

Anyway, not every family wanted to abandon Mike and Tracy. The system of accountability in Louisiana for a school like T.M. landry is very limited. They're not overseen by the Louisiana Board of Education. There is no accountability for them. Some of the claims of physical violence that came up during the story were of interest to the local police.

[Jed Lipinski]

The police reopened some of the complaints and the state cops took over, but no charges followed. This was due in part to a lack of cooperating witnesses, clear records, or an oversight system that would have forced accountability. The feds also looked into T.M. landry. They were curious if Mike and Tracy had defrauded universities by lying on financial aid paperwork or if they'd misled donors. After the little brothers appeared on Ellen, money had poured in from around the country. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, Katie said the investigation appeared to lose steam. Its current status is unclear, but no form charges have been brought against the school. But even though some families stuck with the Landrys, enrollment at the school fell hard after the times story. By 2022, local reports said the school's reputation was destroyed and that they were operating out of the Landrys house again. The school officially shut down soon after, and Mike and Tracy left the area. When I asked Katie and Erica where the Landrys are now, they shrugged and told me, no one seems to know. If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email [e-mail] that's gonesouthpodcastmail.com for bonus content. You can follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at Gone south podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack at Gone south with Jed Lipinski. Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Reese, Dennis, Maddie Sprung Keyser and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone south is edited by, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South.

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