April 7, 2025
Marcia---
This email is sent with the essential message, undergirded by the following factual account, that you should cease addressing Lisa Sayles-Adams by the title, "Dr.," and join with others at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) in calling for her resignation.
………………………………………………………………….
On 1 April 2025, I sent an email to Natalie Rasmussen (Chair of the Minnesota State University/Mankato Department of Educational Leadership; dissertation adviser and chair of the doctoral committee for Lisa Sayles-Adams) that began
"You must issue a public apology for having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams."
I entered
my communication with Rasmussen as an open letter on my blog ( http://www.
Attached to this email is the March 2025 edition of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which I analyze the dissertation (African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership) of Sayles-Adams that astonishingly passed the committee comprised of Rasmussen as dissertation adviser, Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu.
Sayles-Adams took the highly unusual step of putting the dissertation on “embargoed” (delayed availability to the public) status for almost two years after publication. The dissertation became available in November 2024. I ran a hard copy of the dissertation (downloaded copy also attached to this email) and read that document thoroughly, multiple times. This doctoral thesis is a confoundingly terrible presentation of research, full of misspelled words, word usage errors, run-on sentences, and awkward syntax. Further, the dissertation is gravely flawed with regard to structure, presentation of findings, and analysis of data.
The dissertation that appeared to the public in November 2024 should have never been approved by the committee.
In my own document, commencing with “Introductory Comments” and continuing in successive chapters, I provide a detailed analysis of the above-mentioned flaws and others. In doing so, I analyze each of the five chapters in the Sayles-Adams dissertation: Chapter I (along with “Acknowledgments” and “Abstract”), “Background of the Problem”; Chapter II, “Review of the Literature”; Chapter III, “Methodology”; Chapter IV, “Findings”; and Chapter V, “Discussion.”
As of
November 2024, continuing into February 2025, the "embargoed" status
of the Sayles-Adams’s dissertation ended and this doctoral thesis was
listed on “Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for
Minnesota State University, Mankato,” at link, https://cornerstone.lib.
According to librarians at University of Minnesota/Mankato, Sayles-Adams withdrew the dissertation from the Cornerstone listing on 17 February 2025.
Readers of my blog, my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other platforms know that they may go to the above link to observe the current "withdrawn" status of the dissertation.
The current unavailability of the Sayles-Adams dissertation induces grave questions as to why Sayles-Adams is unwilling to submit her dissertation for public review. This runs counter to the very idea of doctoral dissertations, the purpose of which is to contribute to the intellectual universe of public knowledge.
You, as Teacher Chapter President, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, should be offended by the prevailing circumstances surrounding this dissertation.
..............................
Readers of my blog know that in African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership, Lisa Sayles-Adams interviews five African American women school principals with the objective of determining how these principals coped with the challenges they faced because of their position at the intersection of race and gender, especially with regard to interactions with white men.
Sufficiently discerning readers of Lisa Sayles-Adams’s dissertation will readily observe the many flaws of English usage, the structural problems of the dissertation, the poorly executed interviews of the participant principals, the failure to follow up with questions that could have produced material of considerable value in understanding the experiences of these women, and the lack of any meaningful contribution to scholarly literature.
As readers now know, the dissertation is replete with misspelled and misused words, including a rendering of the word, tenet, as “tenant” two times; presentation of the word, “rein,” as reign; and the most brain-boggling of all: the four-times misspelled pseudonym (“Marica” rather than “Marcia) assigned to one of the five interviewees participating in this qualitative study; Sayles-Adams also once renders another pseudonym, Gwendolyn, as “Gwendoly.”
Natalie Rasmussen must issue a public apology for having served as chair of the committee that passed the wretchedly written dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams.
And you, as Teacher Chapter President, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, should also make a public statement lamenting the bestowal of a doctorate at Minnesota State University/Mankato on the basis of such an insubstantial and error-ridden dissertation, then take appropriate action, calling for dismissal of Natalie Rasmussen as Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at Minnesota State University/Mankato and the resignation of Lisa Sayles-Adams as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
As was the case with my email to Rasmussen and many others pertinent to this breach of academic practice, I am entering this communication to you on my blog as an open letter.
………………………………………………………………………………
There has been a notable lack of courage on the part of you and other leaders at the Minneapolis Public Schools during the fourteen months that have ensued since Lisa Sayles-Adams assumed the role of MPS superintendent.
You are, furthermore, deeply culpable for overseeing the lamentable process that resulted in the selection of Sayles-Adams as superintendent.
Gone are the promising initiatives for improving student basic skills and moving toward knowledge-intensive curriculum.
Gone is the notion of genuine "Transformation," with the necessary closing or repurposing of buildings once inferred by Thom Roethke in his first-rate presentation of the grim demographic scenario in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area.
This is a school district in shambles, as I observe each week as more and more parents approach me at the New Salem Educational Initiative to tutor their children in a program already burgeoning at 50 students, with a 25-person waiting list. Poignantly, most of these families are flocking to Ascension Catholic Academy or the near-ring suburbs, vainly seeking an education that is little better than that delivered at the Minneapolis Public Schools; at Ascension, the near-ring suburbs, and the now forlorn KIPP and Harvest Prep academies, families may find a little less drama but are discovering that there is nowhere to turn in the quest for an acceptable education for their children. Thus do the requests for my academic assistance increase perpetually.
Your response, or lack thereof, will be recorded for posterity on my multiple platforms.
Now is the time for you to muster the courage to facilitate the exit of Lisa Sayles-Adams from the Minneapolis Public Schools.
And never, never, address this imposter as "Dr." again. Your action in this regard will also be recorded on my blog, in the second edition of my book, and on my other platforms.
With best regards,
Gary
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
2507 Bryant Ave North
Minneapolis MN 55411
(Cell) 507-301-9902
http://www.newsalemeducation.
Author,
Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect (New Salem Educational Initiative, second edition, 2024
Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (New Salem Educational Initiative, 2022
A Concise History of African America (Seaburn, 2004)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2004 (Minneapolis Urban League, 2008)
The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2008 (Minneapolis Urban League, 2004)
Tales from the Taiwanese (Libraries Unlimited, 2004)
A Short History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence (Praeger, 2003
Culture and Customs of Taiwan ([with Barbara E. Reed] (Greenwood, 1998)
Agricultural Development and the Fate of Farmers in Taiwan, 1945-1990 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1993)
A World History: Links Across Time and Place ([with six other authors] (McDougal Littell, 1988)
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