T.M. Landry College Prep co-founders Tracey and Michael Landry have stepped down from the school’s board as authorities investigate a wide range of allegations against the school, from academic fraud to physical abuse. T.M. Landry College Prep
Of all the challenges that vex black parents, perhaps none is more frustrating than to be forced to send their children to schools where their children’s talents go unrecognized, overlooked, ignored or even squashed.
As a scholar of race and urban teacher education, I see a major disconnect between what schools offer black students and the realities that black students face outside the classroom.
Given how often public schools fail black children, the allure of a “college prep” school – even if it is in a nontraditional school environment – becomes easy to understand. A school like that is seen not only as an alternative to the regular public schools but as the doorway to the most elite educational institutions of higher education in the nation – and all that earning a degree from one of those institutions entails.
Gateway to elite schools
And so it was with T.M. Landry College Prep – an independent private school located in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. The school doesn’t list race or ethnicity in its student profile. However, promotional materials and news reports suggest the majority of the student body is black.
The school began to garner widespread attention in 2017 after students and school officials posted a series of videos of Landry students being accepted into some of the nation’s top colleges and universities – including Ivy League schools. The image of elated black students clad in college sweatshirts as they learned they had been accepted into the likes of Harvard and Yale made for striking theater.
T.M. Landry had seemingly cemented its status as a model school for black students who hail from families that were struggling to make ends meet.
‘Abuse, Fear and Intimidation: How Viral Videos Masked a Louisiana Prep School’s Problems,’ by The New York Times.
Beset by allegations
Unfortunately, it now appears that this dream school was actually a nightmare.
As reported by The New York Times, the husband-and-wife co-founders of the school – Michael and Tracey Landry – allegedly falsified student transcripts and exaggerated or lied about students’ life stories in order to make them more attractive to college admission committees looking to diversify their student bodies.
People are rightly incensed about what the students at T.M. Landry reportedly had to endure.
Beyond the allegations of abuse, there were also academic practices that raise serious questions about T.M. Landry’s approach to educational success. For instance, the high school students spent an excessive amount of time on ACT practice tests – “day after day,” according to The New York Times.
“If it wasn’t on the ACT, I didn’t know it,” Bryson Sassau, a T.M. Landry student who took the ACT three times, told The New York Times as he lamented how ill prepared he was for college.
Rethinking education’s purpose
But even if Sassou and his fellow students at Landry had been prepared for college, would that necessarily make T.M. Landry a good school for black students?
As one of many scholars who studies the interplay of race, culture and education, I believe the true measure of a school’s worth is not the extent to which its students get accepted into elite institutions. But rather, I’d measure a school by the degree to which it inspires students to engage in collective efforts to improve the human condition.
In fairness, T.M. Landry College Prep’s creed includes a line that states: “Commitment to the betterment of self and society as a whole.” The degree to which the school infused that into its daily coursework is questionable.
This is particularly important for black students in the United States, who hail from a population that experiences gross disparities in a broad range of areas, from health and wealth, education and justice, and from infant mortality to life expectancy.
Educational researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings has questioned the overemphasis on test scores. She has stressed the need reframe the way society thinks about education – to go from focusing on the so-called “achievement gap” to an “education debt” that reflects how much more should be invested in the education of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I have stressed the need to focus not on achievement gaps but rather on “opportunity gaps” that show inequities in systems, structures and practices, among other factors, that can prevent children from reaching their potential.
Given the unique history that evolves from America’s “peculiar institution” – slavery – and the many ways in which it has impacted black identity, education must also equip black students with knowledge and skills they need to analyze, critique, question and write about the ways in which they’ve been miseducated.
Even at its best – that is, even if the school wasn’t facing allegations of abuse or that it doctored student transcripts and came up with fake sob stories to get them into college – if the school’s focus was primarily concerned with test prep, T.M. Landry was not a truly transformative school that black students need and deserve.
True transformative schools don’t just work to help black students better fit into the existing educational and social system. They don’t want to just contribute another “beat the odds” story about how so called “merit” and “hard work” can help them overcome centuries and decades of class and race inequity and oppression.
Education, on the other hand, is an emancipatory process of lifelong learning that enables students to study and read the broader society and work to disrupt injustice.
Schools like T.M. Landry that just want to “school” black students well enough to get into the Ivy Leagues so that they can earn a degree, acquire material things and the trappings of success – all the while fitting into the existing power structure – are problematic. Such schools may appeal to black families because of their negative experiences in traditional public schools, but they don’t really enable students to challenge the status quo.
Indeed, as Audre Lorde has argued, the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And as James Baldwin has stressed in his famous “Talk to Teachers,” during these times of anti-blackness, racism, xenophobia and discrimination writ large, it is time to “go for broke” in order to teach black children to break out of the existing social order. In order to do that, educators must radically shift what education is – and who decides what counts as academic and social success.
As of the publication of this article, the school’s co-founders, Michael and Tracey Landry, had stepped down from the school’s board but will continue to teach at the school.
Prisons in America are usually out of sight and out of mind.
But this week, the hopes and dreams of some 180,000 men and women serving sentences in federal prisons are in the national spotlight. After years of delays, the U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on the First Step Act, a justice reform bill already passed by the House of Representatives in May. It’s the most significant federal criminal justice reform effort in a generation.
“They are praying for it,” said Alice Johnson, who served two decades for a nonviolent drug crime before President Trump commuted her sentence earlier this year. She captured America’s heart as she ran into the arms of her family on the day of her release from a federal prison in Alabama.
Many prisoners like Alice Johnson and their families pray for brighter futures, productive careers, freedom from addiction and reunification with their loved ones. Unfortunately, the federal Bureau of Prisons, the nation’s largest correctional system, offers them few opportunities to work toward those goals.
The current rules and treatment of prisoners in the federal justice system are an affront to the dignity of men and women made in the image of God. Reform is overdue.
RELATED: How evangelicals teamed up with the White House on prison reform
The problems with our federal justice system extend from overcrowded prisons to a lack of rehabilitative programming and support for those re-entering society.
These problems are not new. What’s new is the unprecedented willpower exhibited by so many members of both parties in Congress in response to a diverse coalition of faith-based organizations, law enforcement, conservative groups and progressives.
Respecting the dignity of men and women made in the image of God means holding people accountable with sentences that are proportional to their crimes. Men and women should not be languishing in prison years longer than necessary.
The First Step Act would begin to address sentencing inequities. The growing movement to re-evaluate sentence structures has already been proven to yield success in many states. After passing similar reforms, for instance, Texas experienced significant reductions in crime while avoiding the construction of prisons that would have cost taxpayers more than $2 billion.
The First Step Act would also help restore hope to families like Alice Johnson’s. One in 28 children (1 in 9 among African-Americans) have a parent in prison; they are some of the most at-risk boys and girls in the country. Families of federal prisoners are especially likely to be separated from their loved ones by hundreds of miles — some fathers convicted in Michigan do time in Florida. The First Step Act would allow prisoners to earn increased phone and visitation privileges and the right to request a transfer to a facility closer to their loved ones.
The great hope is, of course, that incarcerated people will use their sentences to pursue significant changes in their lives, make amends for their wrongdoing and earn back the public’s trust. It makes sense, then, for prisoners to have access to as many transformative resources as possible — spiritual, educational and vocational.
Yet right now, few such resources are available. By the Bureau of Prisons’ own estimate, the wait list for a basic literacy course is 16,000 names long. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recidivism rate for federal prisoners is 49 percent — a failure rate of 1 in 2.
The First Step Act would increase opportunities for faith-based and nonprofit groups to provide programs that reduce recidivism.
Without hope, opportunities or tools, many prisoners fail to make needed changes, and when they are thrown back into the same life circumstances, they soon return to crime. When they feel connected to God and to their communities, when they have overcome addiction, gained new skills and made a plan for success, they have much a much greater chance of living up to their potential.
That’s why the First Step Act makes addiction help available to all prisoners, no matter their criminal history or risk level. Likewise, every person in federal prison will be offered incentives to participate in programs proven to improve their success rates.
Prisoners who test at low risk for recidivism can use time credits earned through program completion to move, pre-release, to a residential re-entry center or home confinement.
This last point has been a sticking point for those who oppose the legislation. Conservatives call this “early release for violent criminals,” while progressives raise red flags about privacy concerns, as the pre-release programs would expand the use of electronic monitoring for some individuals.
The conservatives’ objections are implausible, while those from the left downplay public safety. Pre-release custody would be available only to those who show a low risk of recidivism, and those who qualify will be well supervised. The gradual transition from prison to a halfway house or other pre-release custody before complete release is a known best practice.
And while we should be vigilant about the unintended consequences of electronic monitoring and seek to reduce supervision levels where appropriate, we must balance this with public safety concerns. The option of transitioning through home confinement — even less restrictive than the status quo — will be expanded under this bill.
The passage of the First Step Act would be just that — a first step on the road to a more just correctional system. It would not mean that our work is finished. The scriptural mandate to remember those in prison (Hebrews 13:3) is an ongoing calling, not a one-time duty. An overwhelming bipartisan vote, we hope, will pave the way for more values-based reforms in the future.
Yet neither should we downplay the significance of this legislation. It would bring substantive change to people now incarcerated in federal prison and those sentenced for years to come. By advancing the First Step Act to the president’s desk, members of Congress would finally show they’re ready to learn from the past and choose a more restorative path forward.
We’re very close to seeing this bill through, but advocates of criminal justice reform have gotten close too many times before, only to start from scratch during the next legislative session. In my role at Prison Fellowship, I have fought for some version of this bill more than five years.
I can only imagine the frustration of those behind bars and their loved ones every time their hopes are dashed by a lack of political will to do the right thing. Policymakers in Washington have a historic chance to bring greater justice, safety and hope to America in time for the new year.
(Heather Rice-Minus is vice president of government affairs, advocacy and public policy at Prison Fellowship, the nation’s largest Christian nonprofit serving prisoners, former prisoners and their families.)
Convenience stores contribute or collect more than $1 billion to charities annually, according to a national survey of retailers released last week by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
Overall, 95% of convenience stores support charitable causes, with 66% of these stores supporting five or more charitable causes. Nearly all companies support local charities (91%) such as church groups, shelters, food banks and other non-sports groups. And approximately half of all retailers (47%) also support national charities. Also, more than three in four retailers (76%) contribute to youth sports groups and more than two-thirds (69%) contribute to local schools via PTAs and other fundraising activities.
In addition, convenience stores also contribute to local charities during specific times of need. Four in five convenience store companies (75%) say they’ve made donations when there was a specific emergency or crisis in the community.
The median charitable contribution per store is $3,925 in direct contributions and $3,054 in donations collected. Cumulatively, the nearly 155,000 convenience stores in the United States contribute or collect $1.03 billion a year to benefit charitable groups.
“We often say in our industry that ‘c-store’ doesn’t just stand for convenience store; it stands for community store and these results clearly demonstrate the commitment our industry has to the communities they serve,” said Jeff Lenard, NACS vice president of strategic industry initiatives.
Convenience retailers noted that their locations in communities also make them convenient places for groups to hold events: 61% allow their property to be used by local groups for fundraising events, whether car washes, cookie sales or direct fundraising.
More than three in four (76%) retailers also say they make local product/food donations to food banks and other groups to support those in need; of this group, 67% donate food and 76% donate beverages.
“Being a small, local chain, we like to keep our charitable giving to local organizations, where our customers know the people it is benefiting and can see their donations at work,” said Dennis McCartney with Landhope Farms (Kennett Square, PA).
A total of 90 NACS retail member companies participated in the association’s Q4 2018 Retailer Sentiment Survey that featured questions about charitable giving.
NACS advances the role of convenience stores as positive economic, social and philanthropic contributors to the communities they serve. The U.S. convenience store industry, with more than 154,000 stores nationwide selling fuel, food and merchandise, serves 165 million customers daily—half of the U.S. population—and has sales that are 10.8% of total U.S. retail and foodservice sales. NACS has 2,100 retailer and 1,750 supplier member companies from more than 50 countries.
Ever wondered why your mom bought you that inexplicable thing? You’re not alone.
I have spent years doing consumer research related to gift giving. In my field, conventional wisdom surmises that when gifts fail to please recipients, it’s accidental. But I’ve determined that sometimes people give bad gifts on purpose.
My personal interest in this dynamic stems from a gag present my dad gave me when I was a kid. As I unwrapped his box in a box in a box, the anticipation grew bigger as the boxes got smaller. When I found that the last box was empty, it crushed me. He thought it was funny. (In my dad’s defense, this happened on April Fool’s Day, an occasion on which we had no gift-giving traditions.)
But I never could shake my urge to learn why someone would give such a rotten gift.
It can be hard to recover from a disappointing gift, even when it’s supposed to be a gag. unguryanu/Shutterstock
Studying mean gifts
The total cost of unwanted gifts is high, both in terms of dollars and in damaged relationships, I’ve found in my research.
Unwanted merchandise returned to U.S. retailers during the 2015 holiday season (excluding fraud cases) totaled US$60.84 billion. This sum of course leaves out the many unwanted gifts that are regifted, ignored, sold, donated or thrown away.
No data exist about how many presents are cruel, but this problem has implications for brands, retailers, marketers and consumers at a time when the National Retail Federation predicts that Americans are spending an estimated $678.75 billion a year on presents.
Depending on whether you’ve got similar tales of woe, you may (or may not) be surprised to learn that many people intentionally give gifts with no concerns for the recipient’s feelings.
Although it seems nonsensical to give someone a gift that will damage a relationship rather than strengthen it, some people deliberately do just that.
Not only are these returns a drag for businesses, they harm friendships and fray family bonds.
To undertake a study of mean presents, the first of its kind, I did in-depth interviews individually with the people in 15 relationships. Each interview with one member of these couples began with the question, “Can you tell me about gift giving between you and your partner over the course of time?” In these interviews, couples often spoke about gifts exchanged within their families, too.
To broaden the study, I searched family-focused message boards at the Babycenter.com website using the keyword “gifts” and analyzed the more than 400,000 relevant results.
People, it turns out, really like to talk about gifts.
They talk online about great gifts and horrible gifts. They seek help from others to figure out what went wrong. They like to complain when they suspect that someone has intentionally given them an awful present.
5 kinds of inconsiderate presents
After reviewing the data, I identified five categories of inconsiderate gifts.
Confrontational. The first are gifts that are essentially personal affronts. One of my personal favorites is the pregnancy test a woman actually gave her childless daughter-in-law for Christmas.
I was also shocked by this other example that is purely aggressive rather than passive aggressive: A woman bought her grown son a book about Christianity knowing that he had given up the faith and didn’t appreciate being reminded of his mother’s disapproval.
Selfish. “To-you-for-me” gifts benefit givers more than recipients.
One sports-loving man in my study epitomized this category by giving his wife a big-screen television for her birthday, just in time for the Super Bowl that she didn’t plan to watch.
Aggressive. Sometimes gifts are explicitly meant to offend.
For example, after a man in my study gave his wife lawn furniture for Mother’s Day, she told him she hated the pattern and asked him to return it. Instead, he bought her more of that furniture for her birthday a few weeks later.
This category of crummy gifts signals a deteriorating relationship. Indeed, this couple got divorced not long after these incidents.
Obligatory. It’s always hard to select gifts when the giver doesn’t know or especially care what the recipient would want.
These obligatory presents, often exchanged and opened in front of groups, are not malicious gifts. They are simply meant to check a box. If everyone gathering round a Christmas tree is going to be giving each other something, you may feel safer giving your Aunt Sally a completely random thing even if you have no clue about what she’d like.
One woman bought her husband clothes for his birthday even though she knew he would end up returning most of them. When asked, “If you knew he wouldn’t like it, why did you buy it?,” she replied, “Probably just so he would have something on his birthday.” She felt the need to give a gift, but no need to please her husband.
Competitive. Gifts given for bragging rights are intended to “out-gift” someone else. A common example of this is what happens when someone gives their grandchild a present the kid’s parents specifically said not to buy.
One woman in my study reported that her parents were competing with her in-laws to give her kids increasingly large and extravagant gifts over her objections – then posting about it on Facebook.
To be sure, these categories may overlap. Ill-conceived gifts can be both aggressive and competitive, and “to-you—for-me” presents can also be confrontational.
Typical Americans are buying 15 gifts this holiday season. If any of yours sound like they fit the mold of these crummy presents, there’s still time to alleviate the suffering by not going through with your plan to give someone a cruel gift – or at least to apologize if it’s too late.
The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson explains why many presents amount to what economists call “deadweight loss”: The company wasted time making it, the giver wasted time buying it, and the receiver wasted time returning it.
In this Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018 photo, journalist and author Shady Lewis Botros poses with a copy of his book, “Ways of the Lord,” in London. The new Arabic-language novel, the author’s first, explores the lives of Egyptian Christians, dealing with discrimination but also a Church aligned with a state seeking to control them. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
Shady Lewis Botros says his recently published novel — “Ways of the Lord” — can be broadly viewed as an attempt to answer one question: What it’s like to be a Christian in Egypt?
The answer, given in stories narrated by the book’s chief character, is complex and often disheartening. It’s giving your children neutral names that don’t identify them as Christians in hopes they’ll have a sporting chance of progress in the mainly Muslim nation. It means facing baseless but dangerous charges of spying for Israel at time of war. It means turning off the lights at home and gathering the family in one room to escape the attention of a Muslim mob on the street.
Beyond entrenched discrimination, the Arabic-language novel explores what the author says is the victimization of Egypt’s Christians by a “politically engineered harmony” between the state and their own church, seeking to control their lives.
“Ways of the Lord” is a rare example of an Egyptian work of fiction whose primary characters are Christian. The result breaks stereotypes that many of the country’s Muslims hold about their minority compatriots. But it also turns the look inward, dispelling the secrecy surrounding the ancient Coptic Orthodox Church — the predominant denomination in Egypt — and addressing its controlling practices and its rivalries with smaller churches.
“Most Coptic literature is about the discrimination or oppression Christians endure with a dose of rights advocacy. That’s understandable but that is also about as far as it goes,” Botros told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from London, his home of 13 years. “This work introduces Egyptians to the reality of Copts as a people who are not always praying, singing hymns and waiting on every word from the church. The novel opens the world of Copts to both Copts and Muslims.”
The novel, the author’s first, takes on added relevance because the Coptic Church leadership has adhered closer than ever to the government. It’s an alliance that gives the community a measure of protection but has raised questions over its independence and has drawn the wrath of Islamic militants, who have over the past two years killed more than a 100 Christians in attacks.
The church’s unity is also being tested, partially over calls for it to modernize some of its rigid rules, like those governing marriage and divorce. The killing in July of the abbot of a monastery, for which two monks are on trial, has led to soul searching about the practices of monasticism, traditionally a cornerstone of the church’s identity.
The novel tells the story of a young Christian man in Cairo, Sherif, who has abandoned the church. He’s in a relationship with a German woman, but to marry her he must first get a church document. So he goes to his neighborhood priest each week for interviews that turn into confessionals.
Sherif relates a series of tales to explain to the priest why he never comes to church. He tells of his family’s past rebellions, like a grandfather who left the Coptic Church because the priest would not baptize his newborn child before her death.
As a young man, he says, he hopped from one Christian denomination to another to explore his identity. His father is cynical about his spiritual search, telling his son, “Generally, they are all con artists.”
The confession sessions with the priest are one of two plot tracks running through the novel. The other follows Sherif’s political activism, which lands him in trouble with the police. His one hope to escape jail time is to marry his girlfriend and go to Germany, but in the end, the girlfriend returns home. He spends a year in jail for a white-collar crime he did not commit.
“Sherif was painted as a character in crisis and that’s not just on account of being a member of a minority, but rather as someone facing an existential crisis over his problems with the church and the state,” said literary critic Ahmed Shawqy Ali.
The novel ends with Sherif surrendering to the powers that crush his rebellion. Jobless after losing his government engineering job, he survives on a small income from doing little jobs for the church, while telling his stories to whoever will listen. “The ways of the Lord are strange and tough to understand,” Sheriff says of his return to the church’s embrace.
Botros said the book’s “fatalistic” ending “shows that, in a place like Egypt, religious minorities like Christians don’t have many choices.”
The church presents itself as the protector of Egypt’s Copts, and many in the community adhere to it fervently.
“The church is a peacemaker that is in harmony with everyone, from the ruling government and civil society groups to al-Azhar,” said a church spokesman, Boulis Halim, referring to the top Muslim institution in Egypt. “We cannot deny that there are shortcomings in some respects, especially the social field, but that will evolve going forward.”
But critics say the interests of individual Christians get lost under the church’s communal leadership.
Kamal Zakher, a Christian who is one of Egypt’s top experts on the Coptic Church, said the church has become a “hostage” to the government for safety, particularly since the rise of Islamic hard-liners starting in the 1970s.
It and the government leadership deal with each other directly, but “they have all forgotten that ordinary Christians deal on daily basis with bureaucrats who, like everyone else, have been influenced by that Islamic revival,” Zakher said.
Karoline Kamel, a researcher on church affairs from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said the novel’s main character is not typical of Coptic youth, who in large part associate closely with the church. But she said the novel gets the theme of control right.
“The church’s protection is focused on itself as an institution, as walls and buildings regardless of what happens to Christians,” she said.
