Analysis of the Wretchedly Written
Dissertation of Minneapolis Public Schools
Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams
Lisa Sayles-Adams’s dissertation, African American
Women Principals: A Phenomenological Study to Explore Their Experiences in K-12
Leadership, should
have never been approved by her doctoral committee at Minnesota State
University/Mankato. Natalie Rasmussen
(dissertation adviser), Candace Raskin, and Efe Agbamu have much for which they
must answer for having approved this abominably written dissertation.
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.”
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment