‘Fast and violent integration’: school desegregation in a Hungarian town

Joint European and national initiatives aiming at Roma inclusion in Central-Eastern European (CEE) education systems have repeatedly been assessed by policymakers, lobby groups and researchers as failing their original targets. My article centres on the in-depth analysis of the evolution of the education policy discourse and practice in a Hungarian municipality; and by doing so, it aims to contribute to this debate in two ways. Firstly, it argues that the literature often restricts itself to a national, and occasionally to a regional scope and hence the ways in which policy transforms as it travels back and forth between transnational, national and local scales become obscured. Secondly, it argues that policy evaluations often adopt a narrow perspective, bound to particular scalar positions. Instead, a more sensitive approach to the process of policy re-contextualization can offer a better understanding of complex and diverse policy effects. The analysis shows that national and supranational pressures significantly transformed the patterns of access to schooling in the studied municipality, however, particular sections of the target-group has been affected differently.