In a 1935 report presented at the 72nd  annual NEA convention, the union's future Executive Secretary Willard Givens wrote: "A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us ... must be subjected to a large degree of social control.... The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order."

In a 2003 article titled "NEA Hastens Death of American Education," veteran journalist Ralph de Toledano wrote that in 1938 "the Institute for Social Research, founded by the Comintern, appeared on the Columbia University campus, taking over the Teachers College, the country's most influential school of education." "Better known as the Frankfurt School," de Toledano continued, "... [the Institute] eschewed the economic aspects of Marxism and promulgated a substitute based on Marx's 1843 preachments. Later labeled neo-Marxism, the program called for the destruction of religion, the family, education and all moral values, along with the capture of the intellectuals and the instruments of mass communication such as the press, radio and films. To this it appended a new Freudianism, which reduced human relationships to rampant sexuality and the grossest pleasure principles -- a program its secret founder boasted `will make America stink.'"

Added de Tolenado: "The Frankfurt School's program, implemented by the NEA, made the goal of education not to educate the young but to give them an anarchic `self-esteem' and deprive them of any sense of what's wrong or right ... [a]nd it preached the alienation of children from parental guidance, urging them to `inform' on their families, as in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany."

The NEA's explicitly stated quest to "foster positive self-esteem" in schoolchildren continues to this day. In his book Inside American Education, Thomas Sowell observes: "Perhaps nothing so captures what is wrong with American schools as the results of an international study of 13-year-olds which found that Koreans ranked first in mathematics and Americans last. When asked if they thought they were `good at mathematics,' only 23 percent of Korean youngsters said `yes' -- compared to 68 percent of American 13-year-olds. The American educational dogma that students should `feel good about themselves' was a success in its own terms -- though not in any other terms."