For charter schools to open they must gain the approval of an authorizing body, most commonly a local school board. When deciding whether or not to authorize a particular charter, school board members often engage in public disputes that entail clashes between multiple and conflicting conceptualizations of the goals of education. Drawing on insights from pragmatic sociology and institutional theory, this paper examines videos of 119 public meetings to document how members of a large, urban school board drew on competing ways of conceptualizing the common good to justify their votes on charter school authorizations. Moreover, it also shows how the neoliberal context of contemporary education limited the range of justifications used. Even school board members who argued against charter school authorizations did with justifications draped in neoliberal language. Neoliberalism thus impacted decisions not by becoming cognitively taken‐for‐granted but rather by shaping the range of arguments made for or against the choice to authorize particular schools.

中文翻译：

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特许学校授权的争议：在新自由主义背景下校董会如何证明自己的投票1

要开放特许学校，它们必须获得授权机构的批准，通常是当地的学校董事会。在决定是否批准特定宪章时，学校董事会成员经常会发生公共争端，这在教育目标的多种概念之间存在冲突。本文从务实的社会学和制度理论的角度出发，考察了119个公开会议的视频，以记录大型的城市学校董事会成员如何以竞争的方式来概念化公益，以证明他们对特许学校授权的投票是正当的。此外，它还显示了当代教育的新自由主义背景如何限制了所使用的辩护范围。即使是反对特许学校授权的校务委员会成员，也都采用新自由主义语言来表述理由。因此，新自由主义不是通过认知上的认可来影响决策，而是通过影响支持或反对选择特定学校的选择的论据范围。