Deflecting the crisis of education:

The COVID‐19 pandemic as a missed moment of decisive intervention towards structural transformation

Abstract

Crises bring about a potential to refocus policy debates and to catalyse decisive interventions (Hay, 1999) towards structural reforms. Comparing the political debates related to education in the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary and Romania between March 2020 and July 2021, we explored the dynamics of the education policy discourse and how these political narratives approached educational and health-related inequalities brought forth by the crisis. By performing critical frame analysis (Dombos et al.,2012) on policy debates concerning crisis management in education, we show how the crisis first beheld the potential for decisive intervention and how this potential was deflected. The deflection of this potential reinforced the dominance of economic crisis framings that disregarded the educational and/or health needs of the most marginalised in both countries. Thus, the educational and health consequences of the pandemic for the most marginalised subjects in the educational systems were progressively rendered invisible in policy debates. The most marginalised subjects were socio-economically disadvantaged students with little or no access to digital learning infrastructures in Romania and teachers and educational workers with health risk conditions in Hungary. Deflection as a dual movement operated both as a social mechanism of inequitable burden redistribution of the consequences of the pandemic within education, and as a discursive mechanism reproducing the dominance of economic reasoning, limiting potential for transformative educational possibilities.