Hey, you know what the scandal is here? It's that HARVARD AND YALE AND PRINCETON AND BROWN AND DARTMOUTH AND STANFORD, in their hunt for the Perfect Black Miracle Student, got taken by this OBVIOUS FRAUD nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/…
The punchline to this story is that these WEREN'T miracle students - the school fakes their transcripts and resumes and course loads - but then a good number of them did totally fine at their Ivies anyway.
I know because I heard about this place last spring and did a bunch of digging into some of their graduates. It was INCREDIBLY sketchy the moment you looked deeper. They didn't have classes and were based in a machine shop, but sent most of their students to high-level colleges!
Despite this.. an amazing number of graduates seemed to be doing fine. Not all by any means, but plenty. Turns out a low-income black kid doesn't have to be a 1-in-a-million child prodigy to thrive in elite higher education! Which raises the question of "why aren't more admitted"
(Of course, we knew this, right? That everyday students can go to Yale, do fine, and maybe get launched into the stratosphere? We know it because rich kids do it all. The. Time.)
The real takeaway of this story is that no one thinks twice about letting in a white kid with a decent transcript if they seem like a hard worker, but if you're poor and black, you better hope you have access to a high school that will fraudulently depicts you as a living miracle
You should see what they made these kids wear, by the way. You'd look at their Instagrams - I looked at so many - and they'd be wearing hoodies and stuff like normal kids. But the school photos? They'd be absurdly done up with bowties and glasses. Because that's what Ivies want.
But you know what? Every single "no excuses" charter does the same thing.
The funny thing - what caught my eye at first - was the charters make the exact opposite claim about how they pulled it off. This place said "Open classrooms, no rules, lots of love." Charters say "Regimented classrooms, discipline." The reality is, the colleges didn't care how.
They just need something - anything - to show them that this isn't a Normal Black Kid. They need to know this black kid is special. The lie TM Landry was telling them was incredibly transparent. It didn't matter, because it's the lie they wanted to hear.
Anyway, I held off saying anything about this because I knew someone (ahem @rmc031) had been looking into it pretty closely. But now that the story's out, this really ought to rock elite universities to their core. So much of the story they tell about themselves is a fiction.
ONE MORE THING: spare a thought for the TM Landry kids whose Yale applications were on the fast track until this morning, and will now be instantly yanked. Many of them would have done fine if they'd gotten in. Now they'll probably end up in Breaux Bridge, LA, forever.
And remember that on top of that handful of kids, there are hundreds of thousands of similarly situated black and brown kids who are in exactly the same boat, except they never even applied.
