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

Analysis of the Wretchedly Written Dissertation of

Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams

 

In this document I provide analysis of 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.

 

               Dissertations cannot be altered once these doctoral theses have been approved by a candidate’s committee and submitted to the library of the college or university at which the doctorate is received. 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.

 

The dissertation that appeared to the public in November 2024 should have never been approved by the committee.  In my own document, commencing with these “Introductory Comments” and continuing in the chapters that follow, 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, 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;  in early March 2025, as I concluded preparation of this analysis, the Sayles-Adams dissertation was still listed as “withdrawn” at that site.  Readers may go to the above link to observe the withdrawn status of the dissertation.

 

Once again, then, the Sayles-Adams dissertation is not available to the public, 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.

 

Although, Sayles-Adams has now withdrawn her dissertation from the Cornerstone site, such documents must be made available to the public.  For those readers who contact me, I will explain how access to this dissertation may be obtained.

 

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.

 

For my own analysis, please now proceed to the chapter-by-chapter comments in the pages that follow.