I assume you have a reliable documented source for your revisionist history? The public education backers have been consistently anti-CHRISTIAN-school which, of course, includes Catholics.
It's one of the skeletons in our closet. Horace Mann, a Unitarian, violently hated calvinism. He was clever enough though, to get the calvinists on board with his scheme to de-christianize America (by brainwashing the children) by pitching it as a way to Americanize all those "shanty Irish."