By Professor Doom
Admin: “The Landry school is sending many of
its students to Harvard this year. Why can’t you?”
--I’ve a friend who teaches in Louisiana,
where the Landry school is located. He would get constantly told of how great
this school is.
T. M. Landry is in Breaux Bridge,
Louisiana, a high-poverty town of fewer than 10,000. The school’s graduates are
overwhelmingly black, poor, or both—a socioeconomic segment that, due to pervasive discrimination, is
notoriously underrepresented in higher ed. Statistically speaking, when a poor
black student is admitted to a Harvard or a Yale, it’s
a minor miracle. The odds of an institution
sending graduate after graduate to the Ivy League and similar schools are
infinitesimal. Watching T. M. Landry’s viral videos was akin to watching
lightning strike the same spot not twice, but over and over again. Had the
Landrys cracked the educational code?
--Emphasis
added, and citation needed, though the article gives none. Of course.
The T.M. Landy College Preparatory School has been famous for years.
This school seemed to specialize in taking poor kids of minimal academic
ability and, in just a few years, send them off to the most elite schools in
the country.
Admin: “Why can’t you have the same the level
of success as Landry? We have much better students here. Is it because you’re
not as good a teacher?”
--I can’t emphasize strongly enough how
irritating it was to get these kind of missives; I received something similar
at a CC.
The Landry school was wildly successful, and nobody thought it strange
how they could consistently do so well with so little.
TM
Landry boasts a 100% graduation average and a 100% 4-yr. college acceptance
rate!
The school was a fraud. A recent article in The Atlantic
identifies the school as a fraud, but then goes on to ask, but not answer, an
important question: how did these fake students succeed once they came to a
school like Harvard?
Let’s spell out the fraud here:
The Landrys’ school seems to have
been a fraud all along—faking transcripts, forcing students to lie on college
applications, and staging rehearsed lessons for curious media and other
visitors. According to the Times,
an atmosphere of abuse and submission helped maintain the deception, with
Michael Landry lording over his flock of children like a tyrant. In the Times story,
Landry admitted to helping children with college applications while denying any
fraud.
Any school without integrity can get a 100% graduation rate, after all.
But how are these kids succeeding at the elite schools?
Still, a mystery remains. Even
taking the alleged fakery into account, how did T. M. Landry seem to fool so
many of America’s most prestigious universities for years?
The article details more of the obvious fraud at the school, and asks
questions like the above several times. It never answers the main question,
however, and it’s a fair question. Since the school did little educating of
students, and the students coming in had little education to begin with…how did
our elite universities not notice these students, who quite possibly were
barely literate at best, really weren’t up to the presumably high standards at
these schools?
Admissions officers are vague about who they let in, and it’s been known
for years that it’s unwritten policy they use affirmative action to make sure
“the right people” get in. Asians have to score much higher than other
ethnicities, for example, to get accepted, or so a recent lawsuit affirms (as an unwritten policy, proving such in
court might be tough).
On the other hand, David Hogg, the kid the media foisted on us after
that weird shooting in Broward County, was recently let into Harvard despite his respectable,
but low for Harvard, SAT score.
Any Asian student with such a low score who is at Harvard is welcome to contact
me to show me how wrong I am about that unwritten policy…
So how are these quite possibly illiterate students doing well at elite
schools? The school’s first graduating class was in 2013…we should be seeing
some college graduates by now. How are they doing? What were their majors?
The second question is the key, and allow me to conjecture how marginal
students could still do well at an elite school.
See, many schools, even quality schools, have a “two tier” system of
education. Yes, if you want a quality education instilling value, you can get
it at the school…but if you want a bogus education, you can get that, too. It’s
up to the student to figure it out, although certainly an advisor at the
school, after dealing with the student, could well steer the student into a
real education, or a fake education.
I strongly suspect these Landry school fake students aren’t going to
Harvard to get their law degrees, or to Princeton to get degrees in
mathematics. No, they’re getting degrees in Gender Studies, or African-American
Studies, or something where their gender or skin color, and not the content of
their learning, is determining their success.
Please understand, I’ve highlighted Gender Studies courses…you don’t
need to know much to do well there, just don’t shave. It’s all ideology and anger, and you don’t
need to be academically gifted to do well with that. Harvard
totally has such programs, so my
conjecture is hardly a stretch.
Even our elite schools, apparently, are selling fake degrees, or at
least giving fake courses to fake students.
Thus it is that a fake college prep school can operate for years,
provided its students are the right skin color, as such a color can get a
student into an elite school which is just as eager to show their “success” by
awarding degrees to students who after graduation probably still can’t perform
at the high school level. Granted, many college graduates are no better off
than when they graduated high school, as is well documented, but in this case the fraud was so blatant we
really need to start asking questions.
At least I, unlike the author at The
Atlantic, can answer some of those questions.
It's corruption all the way down, now. Cradle to grave. (Assuming your mother didn't decide you were an undue burden, of course. Which is yet more corruption.)
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