"Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees."
It's hard to see how this model would be constitutionally permissible in the US, since it would mean that "independent" religious schools either could not exist or would have to be publicly funded, either of which would amount to a pretty clear breach of the First Amendment. I can't really think of a way around this. The latter option seems to work ok in Finland, where religious education is part of the curriculum anyway. But I don't know that they have the kind of nutball religious extremism that the US has, which I think many of us would be extremely reluctant to publicly fund even if that was the price to pay to eliminate private education.
Thoughts?