Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams
The Inevitable Academically Non-Substantive Superintendent
The appointment of Lisa Sayles-Adams as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools on 1 December 2023 was a disastrous moment in the history of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Education professors are campus embarrassments.
Throughout the United States, the typical degree for those who served as college and university presidents is the Ph.D. (granted for legitimate scholarly fields such as mathematics, chemistry, history, economics, and literature); rarely does one whose doctoral degree is an Ed. D. (Education Doctorate, given to those matriculating in departments, schools, and colleges of education) gain a college or university presidency. And college and university presidents do not waste their time taking non-academic courses of the type taken by those seeking certification as education administrators or those whose goal is to obtain the intellectually flimsy Education Doctorate (Ed.D.); typically, college and university presidents are scholars who were tapped to serve in various administrative positions who learn on the job at various posts in the hierarchy, often serving as provost before making their way to the top as president.
But superintendents in the public schools typically have at most one legitimate academic degree, a bachelor’s degree; any graduate degrees that a superintendent has received were granted in education programs. And many superintendents never received even one credible academic degree; many received degrees in elementary education, the least academically substantive degree on any college or university campus.
Lisa Sayles-Adams fits the profile in this regard for a superintendent; she did receive a degree in the academically substantive field of political science, but otherwise she has received only degrees for education programs >>>>>
Lisa Sayle-Adams, Academic Credentials
Ed, D., Educational Leadership (2022)
Minnesota State University/Mankato
M.A., Curriculum and Instruction (2002)
University of Minnesota/Twin Cities
B.A. Political Science (1992)
University of Minnesota/Twin Cities
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The Wretchedly Written Dissertation of Lisa Sayles-Adams
Lisa Sayles-Adams wrote a particularly terrible dissertation, African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership, astonishingly passed by a committee comprised of Natalie 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.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 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.
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I have made Lisa Sayles-Admas’s dissertation, African American Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12 Leadership, available to individuals who have expressed interest.
For the dissertation, Lisa Sayles-Adams interviewed 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.”
The avowed goal of determining the experience of African American female principals operating at the intersection of race and gender was a worthy pursuit, making the failed exercise on the part of the maladroit Lisa Sayles-Adams all the more lamentable.
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