Introductory Comments >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota< Volume XI, Number Ten, April 2025

Open Letters to Officials at

Minnesota State University/Mankato

and Others Regarding the

Wretchedly Written Dissertation

of Minneapolis Public Schools

Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams           

In this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I provide approximately 150 open letters that I wrote between Tuesday, 1 April 2025, and Monday, 7 April 2025, to Natalie Rasmussen (Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Administration;  and Chair of the Committee that passed Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams’s dissertation, African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership);  officials at Minnesota State University/Mankato;  officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools;  and to Willie Jett, Commissioner, Minnesota Department of Education. 

 

Also included are open letters written to the Minnesota Professional Ethics and Standards Board;  and to others in Minneapolis who should be interested in the case of the wretchedly written Lisa Sayles-Adams dissertation.

 

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The dissertation, African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership, written by Lisa Sayles-Adams (as of 11 March 2025, superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools), published in 2022 after approval of a committee at Minnesota State University/Mankato consisting of Natalie Rasmussen (dissertation adviser), Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu. 

 

For a reason that I have not yet determined, 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.

 

The dissertation completed, approved, and submitted by Lisa Sayles-Adams 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.

 

As of November 2024, continuing into February 2025, Sayles-Adams’s dissertation was listed on “Cornerstone:  A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato,” at link, https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/1266/ . 

 

According to librarians at University of Minnesota/Mankato, Sayles-Adams withdrew the dissertation from the Cornerstone listing on 17 February 2025;  the Sayles-Adams dissertation continued for many days to be listed as “withdrawn” at the above site, but as of Tuesday, 8 April the site no longer provides that information.

 

Once again, then, the Sayles-Adams dissertation is not available to the public via Cornerstone or any other current listing, creating more mystery as to why Sayles-Adams is so hesitant 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.

 

In her dissertation, African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership, Lisa Sayles-Adams interviews five African American 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.

 

The dissertation that appeared to the public in November 2024 should have never been approved by the committee.

 

Beyond errors impermissible for a competently written, reviewed, and edited dissertation, though, are substantive inadequacies of the Sayles-Adams dissertation:

 

The chapters focused on the “Background of the Problem,” “Review of the Literature,” and “Methodology” cover half of the dissertation.  These chapters should have been much briefer, just enough to provide readers with an overview of the literature pertinent to challenges of African American women in positions of leadership and to establish the need for more data and information concerning African American public school principals in particular. 

 

Much of Chapter II, “Review of the Literature” presents information on African American history that is well-covered in a bevy of books (obviating the need for the large number of citations that Sayles-Adams gives) and only tangentially related to the immediate topic of focus:  Sayles-Adams discusses the specific role of African American women principals during the Jim Crow era---  and how those roles and challenges changed in the post-Jim Crow era---  lamentably sparsely.

 

Chapter III, “Methodology,” could also have been much shorter, more concisely discussing the value of qualitative research and oral collections, along with a briefer explanation of Sayles-Adams’s own interview process.  Further, as I point out in my “Comments” in the articles of this document, Sayles- Adams fails to follow up with questions the answers to which would have been enormously

interesting in understanding more thoroughly the experiences, motivations, and professional goals of her interviewees.

 

These failures in methodology as actually utilized results in very slim findings and shallow discussion.  Sayles-Adams gives appearance of using citations, which should be used sparely if at all in the “Findings” and “Discussion” chapters, to pad those already too short chapters.  An enormous opportunity is lost to discover more profoundly the experiences of African American women principals.  Sayles-Adams more often retreats into other authors’ findings as revealed in the literature in referring to the impact of race and gender on the women principals whom she herself interviewed, rather than providing more engaging material from her own interviews, asking follow-up questions, and thereby depending on her own original research to make a substantial contribution to the literature on African American women leaders in general and on African American women school principals specifically.    

 

The extraordinarily poor quality of Lisa Sayles-Adams’s dissertation makes all the more intriguing the author’s taking the rarely used step of placing the dissertation on “embargoed” status for many months and then taking the nearly unprecedented step of withdrawing her dissertation from public view on the Cornerstone digitalized format.   

 

The articles below list those to whom I sent emails, which were then listed as open letters on my blog.

 

In each article I provide a salient communication for the category of recipient covered.  Other communications in the various categories are given in the Appendix.

 

In the case of members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, the communications were only rendered as open letters on my blog (http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com ), while two communications to recipients listed in Article #5 were sent only as emails;  they were not entered on my blog.

 

Readers may now proceed to the articles below to view these communications, starting with Article #1, providing my communication to Natalie Rasmussen.