A few years ago, a small private school in an underprivileged black community in Louisiana,

the TM Landry College Preparatory Academy, made national headlines for propelling student after student

into elite universities like Harvard and Yale.

But as New York Times journalist Katie Banner and Erica Green report in their new book,

Miracle Children, the school's success was built on lies and threats. I spoke with Benner and Green and began by asking what led them to look into this school.

It was very unusual because I was covering the Justice Department at the time,

but Eric and I had both seen the viral videos when they were on all over social media.

And like everybody else in the country, we were so excited about these students getting into

Harvard and Princeton and Stanford, Yale, etc. And part of the reason we were excited about

is because they were black students just achieving the highest heights. So when I got a call from a source, actually a former DOJ source,

who said that she had heard that something else was happening to the school,

that there was misconduct, that there might be an abusive situation,

and that the students themselves were being manipulated by their teachers

to lie about their lives in order to get into these elite schools.

I called Erica immediately. She was our education policy reporter. And I said, I think this is a real story.

You would know better though. You cover education. But this feels like it's the kind of story that tells us a lot about race in America.

Erica, I'd imagine with so many people invested in the school and invested in selling that story,

it might be hard to get people to talk to you about it, was it?

Believe it or not, this was a rare case in my career where we had droves of people ready to talk about it.

And that is what gave us this sense of urgency. There were families

who had, you know, collected stories about what was transpiring in the school over a few

months. They were prying information out of their children that was very disturbing. And they, you

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