Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., after suggesting at an Islamic conference in May that public schools should be based on the Quran, explained today that he was trying to suggest a way to improve schools that drew on many faith-based communities.

“This is a message that I’ve given consistently to Christian groups, Jewish groups,” Carson told The Indianapolis Star. “The question becomes for me, ‘Why are the graduation rates higher at faith-based institutions? What are they doing that we might be able to extract from that?” He added that religious schools are “given a different kind of freedom to tap into these young American minds.”