Why don't we look at the effects of avoding/condeming bringing religious influences into schools:
USSR, People's Republic of China, North Korea, North VietNam...
Extremism is the problem here. Not religion.
There is no conflict between faith and reason. At least there shouldn't be. Here is an article about the newest book by Thomas Woods about how the Catholic Church has one of history's great patrons of science. Maybe we can get Pope Benedict to be a witness for the evolutionary side in this farcical Kansas debate.
Someone once said "if you remove religion from people's lives, they won't then believe in nothing, they'll believe in anything". The primary reason those places forcefully removed religion from public life was so they could replace it with a secular religion worshiping the government, or a particular leader.
Religion still existed in those places. Just the particular diety was changed.