Bowdoin College
01/20/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 01/20/2026 18:31
New York Times Review: Katie Benner ’99 Book 'Miracle Children'
Now, Benner and fellow NYT reporter Erica L. Green have taken an even deeper dive into the scandal in their book, Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises.
The book, released this month, examines the tiny private school in Breaux, Louisiana, which served mostly working-class children while boasting a 100 percent college acceptance rate as its students were placed at the country's top universities.
Excerpts from Kevin Carey's review in The New York Times:
Benner and Green have published the definitive book-length account of the T.M. Landry scandal. If their original article was an indictment of the school's deceitful proprietors, their book, Miracle Children , makes the case against the punishing inequities and wide-ranging market for Black trauma that enabled the scam.
The book begins at the peak of T.M. Landry's success, a cringe-worthy episode of Ellen celebrating two brothers headed to Stanford and Harvard. Benner and Green deftly outline the academic, cultural, and political trends that made T.M. Landry possible while filling in Michael and Tracey's [the married couple behind T.M. Landry] back story. But the best, most engrossing parts of Miracle Children come in several long, central chapters describing the families recruited for an ever-expanding design.
Read "The Lie That Elite Colleges, and a Nation, Wanted to Believe" in The New York Times.
Bowdoin College published this content on January 20, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on January 21, 2026 at 00:31 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]