Orphanage idea gets better reception
Star Tribune, May 24, 2000
By Mitchell B. Pearlstein
  
  Anyone else notice the commotion that has not followed Mary Jo Copeland's announcement earlier this month that she wants to start an orphanage in Brooklyn Center?
     To be sure, some people have spoken out foursquare against the venture. Others are responsibly skeptical about it. And officials and residents in Brooklyn Center have objected, claiming that the proposed site is too commercial and, thereby, not appropriate for 200 or more kids.
     But there is a world of difference between scattered barbs and a groundswell of white-hot opposition. Just as there is a big difference between arguing over where such an institution ought to be built as opposed to whether it ought to be built in the first place. Clearly, we are seeing no local replay of the kind of byrote condemnations across the country that greeted suggestions, almost a half-dozen years ago, that orphanages might have a renewed role to play in serving abused and neglected children.
     "Dickensian" was how columnist Ellen Goodman portrayed them during one of our poorer national stabs at a sober debate about a serious subject. "Unbelievable and absurd" was how Hillary Rodham Clinton described the possibility of bringing orphanages backnot that they have ever left completely.
     How to explain what seems to be a new comfortableness with the very idea of orphanages (or group homes, or congregate care facilities, or whatever less loaded name one might prefer)?
Well, first thing, it helps that the plan on the table is Copeland's and not that of the radioactive Newt Gingrich. It was the former House speaker, you may recall, who ignited the short-lived and unresolved national controversy in the mid-'9Os by saying something (I forget exactly what) that was uncommonly bold, if perfectly humane, as is his habit.
     Copeland, on the other hand, perhaps more than anyone in Minnesota, is regularly treated like sacred royalty. Such deference is not without cause, of course, as Sharing and Caring Hands, her Minneapolis ministry to the homeless and severely troubled, is the embodiment of a profoundly good and loving deed.
     (I should add here, in fairness to city fathers and mothers in Brooklyn Center, that I do not know if the proposed location near Interstate Hwy. 94 and Hwy. 100 is felicitous. But I sympathize with their having to vie with Copeland, who seems, once again, to have divined that the Lord himself has picked a spot. The home will be built, she has been quoted as saying, and it will be built in Brooklyn Center. God wins every time. She does have a pipeline.)
     But beyond any question of disparate messengers, I would argue that people are increasingly disposed to consider orphanages fairly, as there is ever-increasing recognition of several very sad things.
     These include the fact that more than a few families are in meltdown because of drugs and other problems. That a hefty number of children are in horrific situations and need much healthier places in which to live, whether or not they are technically orphans. And that adoption, blessed an option as it can be, is not always possible, and that the permanent temporary care of foster care is fundamentally unfair to many boys and girls who deserve more connectedness and continuity in their lives.
     But I would also like to think that another reason more people are willing to give something called orphanages a try has been the emergence in recent years of important research by a friend of mine about how successful, in fact, they routinely have been.
     Richard McKenzie is a prolific economist at the University of California, Irvine. He also spent much of his childhood, in the 1950s, growing up in a churchrun orphanage in North Carolina. Offended by what he took to be perpetual displays of nonsense and bigotry about homes like his, he has surveyed about 1,600 alumni from nine orphanages in the Midwest and South. What has he learned about the graduates, men and women now in their 50s and older? Remarkable things like these.

• They have a 17 percent higher high-school graduation rate than their counterparts in the general population.
• Their college graduation rate is 39 percent higher.
• Their median household incomes are one-tenth to three-fifths higher (depending on age group).

     As a group, McKenzie writes, the alumni have outpaced their counterparts in the general population by significant margins on practically all measures, with the list including not just diplomas and dollars, but also attitude toward life. Results like these are Dickensian only in the sense that Dickens himself managed to make a nice contribution or two.
     The point in all of this is not that growing up in an orphanage, or any similar institution, is as intrinsically welcome as growing up in a reasonably stable home with devoted and functioning parents. Not nearly.
     The point, rather, is that discussions about places like orphanages have little to do with choosing among model alternatives and everything to do with choosing among constricted and not necessarily attractive ones.
     Might at least some kids fare better in an orphanage as opposed to whatever else might be available? Without question, yes, and I'm thankful that Mary Jo Copeland, in all her damn-the-torpedoes grit and nerve (I trust she'll excuse the expression), agrees.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis, which has published two reports by Richard McKenzie on his research.