Benner and Green have published the definitive book-length account of the T.M. Landry scandal ... The narrative centers on Michael, a charismatic grifter and, according to firsthand testimony from multiple students, a violent, serial abuser of children ... 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 ... But the best, most engrossing parts of Miracle Children come in several long, central chapters describing the families Michael recruited for his ever-expanding design ... Michael flattened his charges into caricatures; the authors restore them to three dimensions with precision and care. Young men and women like Doraian Givens, a viola-playing descendant of scholars and activists, emerge in full form — proud, imperfect and determined. Most of them knew something was off about the Landrys ... A lay reader might assume that having your rampant child abuse and elaborate fraud revealed on the front page of the newspaper of record would result in disgrace and prosecution — or at the very least, the end of your scam. The actual story of what happened next in Miracle Children is far more sobering, but unsurprising given how convincingly the authors describe the broken system of educational opportunity ... Miracle Children is an urgent chronicle of corruption inside corruption. It might also be a prophecy of worse to come.

The story of T.M. Landry reveals the historic shortcomings of the U.S. education system and how these directly imperil the lives of Black children ... Throughout, Benner and Green never lose focus on the children at the heart of the T.M. Landry scandal, many of whom were fighting an uphill battle, even if their lives weren’t the type of melodramatic fiction the Landrys conjured for college applications. With its ambitious storytelling and exhaustive investigative work, Miracle Children is riveting, well-paced and heart-wrenching.

Two New York Times reporters invite readers to look under the hood, so to speak, of a small private school in Louisiana that placed poor Black children into the country’s top schools ... The book tells of a host of enablers, including college admissions staff—who were eager to believe 'tales of black suffering' that fit a clichéd narrative—and the state of Louisiana, which has no mechanism for oversight of private schools. In a clear and nuanced account, the authors dig deep into the schools’ red flags ... An alarming story of a private school that achieved improbable outcomes.