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Educational policies in Central and Eastern Europe: legacies of state socialism, modernization aspirations and challenges of semi-peripheral contexts

The article introduces a special issue of Policy Futures in Education on changes and challenges in educational policies and systems of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The countries in the region share some characteristics, such as their historical experience with the authoritarian–socialist or communist rule and its impact on education policies, as well as their long-lasting economic semi-peripherality. Differences within the region are also discussed in the article: from macro-level economic gaps to relative dissimilarities of education systems’ structures, as well as international assessment benchmarks. The articles in this issue present analyses of educational policies in Belarus, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. A theme that emerges most clearly across these texts is the complexity of East–West relationships. Read together, the contributions serve as a call for a more nuanced and contextualized look at CEE. Transformation of educational systems that entails the interplay of past legacies and borrowed policies can bring about troubling outcomes, exacerbated by the entanglement of education in a wider agenda.