In Washington, which you and a party of Catholic education leaders recently visited, seven of the twelve Catholic schools in the Center City Consortium or Zone have recently been forced to convert to charter schools and forego their Catholic character because of the constitutional arrangement that denies public funding to religious schools. Your readers deserve to know this.
While recognising your interest and purpose in exploring global and especially Finnish computer-based learning and teacher quality, I note there are hardly any Catholic schools in Finland, while in Brussels, which you also visited, there are no private fee-paying Catholic schools because the Belgian government fully-funds all of them. In fact, most Belgian schools are Catholic schools. (I acknowledge that your focus was ICT in EU schools).
Moreover Finland, unlike Australia and Belgium, has a homogeneous population and takes no immigrants and refugees. Foreigners and under-achieving kids are permanently consigned to special needs classes for all of the curriculum and selection between academic and technical streams is rigidly enforced at the age of fourteen.
I am sure that you would not endorse such a system. However, isn't there a better and more critical edge that LEST could bring to its study tours for leaders of Church school systems that promote justice as the Gospel hallmark?
