April 4, 2025
Sharon---
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 lead Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Davis Center staff and other Board of Education directors by calling for her
resignation.
You are,
along with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Assistant to the Superintendent and
Board, one of two people at MPS (in addition to prominent figures in
Minneapolis, the Twin Cities Metro area, and Mankato) to whom I have given a
hard copy of my Analysis of the Wretchedly Written Dissertation of
Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams:
Hold on
to that document for the reference of other Board members and others to
whom you should be referring my revelatory analysis.
You
should have by now read Analysis of the Wretchedly Written Dissertation
of Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams; you
have been remiss if you have not done so and should do so very soon;
just as importantly, you should locate the items that I identify in the
Sayles-Adams dissertation (attached to this email) so as to verify my analysis.
..............................................................................................
On
Tuesday, 1 April 2025, 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."
..............................................................................................
As I
complete the second edition of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis
Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, the issue of
reference has become an unexpectedly important topic of focus, the facts
pertaining to which are conveyed herein.
..............................................................................................
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 President Edward S. Inch; Minnesota State
University/Mankato Assistant Provost for Research and Dean of the 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/Mankato Teachers of Tomorrow leaders Kimberly Chavez and Lina
Wang; and with Minnesota State University/Mankato Student Government
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.
Similar
communications will be forthcoming to the members of the Minneapolis
Public Schools Board of Education; in the cases of these inept Board
members, though, to whom I once communicated sophisticated analyses in emails
that they were either too ignorant, in denial, or corrupt to understand, my
communications will to most be strictly in the open letter format.
..............................................................................................
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.
.....................................................................................................
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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Institutional change
only results from courageous in-person activism.
There has
been a notable lack of courage on the part of you, other MPS Board of Education
directors, and staff members at the Davis Center 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.
I once
regarded you as a person of considerable integrity and, in my observation, you
may now realize the grave error that was made in the selection of Sayles-Adams
as superintendent.
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.blogspot.com
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)
