Neel---
Yesterday I sent an email to Natalie Rasmussen (Chair of the Minnesota State University/Mankato Department of Education; 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."
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My communications with Rasmussen and others who should be chagrined for having such a dissertation passed in doctoral committee at Minnesota State University/Mankato constitute examples of the activism necessary for achievement of overhaul in public education.
When I sent you a hard copy of the first edition of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, I commended your expressed interest in education change but conveyed the message that advocating for a constitutional amendment mandating high quality public education for all students would be ineffective and a waste of time.
Attempting to induce change in public education cannot be achieved with remote maneuvers at the legislative or constitutional level:
Those in the public education bureaucracy are highly practiced in evading consequences for violating such mandates; any change must be done via in-person advocacy and ongoing energetic activism.
The current situation presents an opportunity for you to take a public stand, lamenting the circumstance that a dissertation of the abominable quality produced by Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams could have ever passed in committee at an institution of purported higher learning.
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I entered my communication with Rasmussen as an open letter on my blog ( http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com ), and I also entered follow-up email communications to Minnesota State University/Mankato Assistant Provost for Research and Dean of tof he Graduate School Pieter de Hart; and to Minnesota State University/Mankato Dean of the College of Education Mwarumba Mavita on that blog. I acted in like manner as follow-up to communications with Minnesota State University/MankatoTeachers of Tomorrow leaders Kimberly Chavez and Lina Wang; and with Minnesota State University/Mankato Student Government President President Roshit Niraula and Vice-President Rebecca Jay. Similarly, I will be entering this email to you on that platform, with an international viewership that includes nations as far-flung as Russia, Germany, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Algeria, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
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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.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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
If you genuinely care about change in public education, you also should 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.
I would think, also, that you would argue for the dismissal of Natalie Rasmussen as Chair of the Department of Education at Minnesota State University/Mankato.
One cannot make institutional change of any kind from afar. Think of the arduous activism of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm.
Institutional change only results from courageous in-person activism.
Now is your chance.
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
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)
