April 4, 2025
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.
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from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other platforms know that they may go to the above link to observe the current "withdrawn" status of the dissertation.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 and other highly paid ($179,375 in your own case as of September 2024, mostly likely higher at this juncture in April 2025) staff members at the Davis Center, Minneapolis Public Schools, during the fourteen months that have ensued since Lisa Sayles-Adams assumed the role of MPS 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.
Again, similar communications will be forthcoming to Ryan Strack and the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, to go with the bevy of emails already sent and entered as open letters on my blog.
But you and other key staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools must assume this responsibility as your own, whatever the MPS Board of Education does or does not do.
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,
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