Problem: The Hungarian government had initiated a comprehensive set of policies addressing school desegregation and the integrated education of disadvantaged and Roma pupils in the period between 2002 and 2010. 2002 marked a rupture in national policy paradigms: contrasting to the earlier essentialist policy logic, the education of the disadvantaged and the Roma was reframed as a social, territorial and human rights problem. European social inclusion policy frameworks served as a constant reference point and source of validation for the creators of the national education policy. Nevertheless these actors were determined to resolve such locally defined problems as the ethnic discrimination and school segregation of Roma pupils and they needed to face the challenge of regulating an extremely decentralized system where local school maintainers have been endowed with wide autonomies. Several new regulatory instruments were developed to incent municipalities to reorganize their educational services in line with equity principles and in general, to align the regulatory practices and instruments of urban municipalities. Our research scrutinizes how the national reform initiatives were received in two Hungarian towns (Birdtown and Parktown): how local cultural and institutional factors shaped the process of policy translation.

Research question: The paper inquires how the policy paradigm shift that came about at the central governmental level was translated to the terms of urban education governance. Looking at the transformation of social services, we scrutinized how institutional differences account for the variation in education policy implementation. We looked at how local, traditional markers of school hierarchies in the educational system (most importantly the relevant factors of competition for pupils) and the logic of organizing educational services (administering school enrollment, school catchment zones, the distribution of extra resources among schools) were put off and got reinterpreted locally in this complex process characterized by both compliant and resistant actions in multiple levels.

Theoretical framework: (1) Our research approach was inspired by studies focusing on the contextualization of global policies to national, local institutional conditions (Baker&LeTendre 2005, Ball 1998, Schriewer 2003, Simons et al. 2009) as well as by qualitative surveys about the dynamics of urban education governance in relation to school choice (Maroy 2006, van Zanten 2009). (2) The investigation also stems from the literature on policy change and shifts in policy programs (Hall 1993). The transformation of the policy programme and the dynamics of change is examined from the interpretive approach of “discursive institutionalism” (Schmidt, 2010) that locates the analysis within the policy sociology heritage that considers policy-making as social learning. 

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