In 2015, just over 163,000 people sought refuge in Sweden, most of them within a few months when more than 1 million people crossed the Mediterranean See to seek asylum in  Europe. A comparison between the Nordic countries, calculated per 10,000 inhabitants, shows that during the years 2015-2016, Sweden approved 70 asylum applications, Norway 25, and Denmark and Finland about 12 (Örstadius, 2021). This situation became relevant again in connection with the report of the Swedish results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey in 2018 which was published by the end of 2019 (NAE, 2019). At the same day as the results were published in Sweden, national newspapers and the then largest opposition party, the Moderates, noted that 11% of students were excluded from participation in the survey—the highest figure among the participating countries in the PISA survey—due to deficiencies in the Swedish language. The debate that followed revealed a deep gap between those who trusted the reliability of the PISA test for Sweden and those who distrusted the results. This paper focuses on how a transnational cooperation initiates national 'communicative discourses' in line with Schmidt’s (2008, 2015) understanding of the concept, with implications for national education policy efforts. The paper explores what ‘normative background ideas, ‘cognitive foreground ideas’ and main actors that becomes important in this communicative discourse, as well as the implications of the arguments that divided the actors into two groups: those who trusted the OECD and the Swedish National Agency for Education (NAE) and those who did not.  

The purpose of this study is to explore the different actors, interests, and perspectives represented on different arenas in the debate on the implementation of the 2018 PISA survey and on the assessment of the result of the test. The guiding research questions are: ‘What normative ideas are at stake in the public deliberations on the 2018 PISA results? and ‘Who were the main actors involved in the communicative discourses on the 2018 PISA results and why did the question of percentage who were given permission to refrain from participating in the test became political charged in Sweden?’

The importance of numbers for policy discussions related to PISA has previously been emphasized by Grek (2009). The great importance that the OECD, as a transnational organization, has had for the education policy debate in Sweden has been noted by, for example, Grek (2017), Author (2020), and Author and Non-Author (2020). The transnational pressure of policy transfer from the PISA results has also been examined by Dobbins and Martens (2011) from a French perspective and from Chung (2019) from a Finnish perspective. Rautalin (2018) showed how critics of the Finnish school system used Finland’s lower ranking in 2012 to argue for the need for education policy changes. International large-scale assessments like PISA are used by national policy actors both for policy borrowing from “league winners” and for distancing themselves from “league losers (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2018).  Countries that perform worse than expected often speak of the phenomenon of national “PISA shocks” as a result of their low position in the international rankings (Haugsbakk, 2013; Pons, 2012; Waldow, 2009). However, this paper shows that also improved PISA results may lead to polarizing debates, since the number-based PISA results fit well within a public debate.

Drawing on Vivien Schmidt (2008, 2015), ideas are represented in discourse, which is the interactive process by which ideas are processed, changed, and conveyed. Discourse is here understood as institutionalized structures of meaning that influence what ideas are represented and how arguments are made. In the policy sphere, where different policy ideas are discussed, policy actors are engaged in coordinative discourses to create, elaborate, and justify certain societal and programmatic policy ideas and communicative discourses where policy ideas are deliberated and contested in the public sphere (Schmidt, 2008, 2015). Power in ideas is about actors using certain elements in ideas to seek to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs in a certain direction at the expense of other ideas. The distinctive feature of power in ideas is the influence of normative background ideas—that is, the often unconscious and unformulated public philosophy or public opinion that constitutes the background and prerequisite for certain policymaking to be possible. At this background and normative level, ideas become depoliticized and perceived as general knowledge or common sense (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016). Drawing on Fairclough (2001, 2010), three phases guided the text analysis. The first phase consists of describing what content and values are expressed in the empirical data that are examined. The analysis focusing on the descriptions of the 2018 PISA results constitutes the first part of the results section. The second phase of the analysis is the interpretative phase, in which attention is directed toward the discourse practices formed by the texts regarding who or what becomes the central subject and which power relations become visible. In the third and final phase of the analysis, the central interest is turned toward explanations on how the language in different texts forms power relations and argues for what is presented as common sense. The data were collected from the day the 2018 PISA results were published by the NAE, on December 3, 2019, and onwards. All reports from national authorities regarding the issue of excluded students in the 2018 PISA test are included, along with the OECD’s report commissioned by the Swedish government on the same issue. Three newspaper articles from Expressen (Independent Liberal) and one newspaper article from Dagens Nyheter (Independent Liberal) are included in the data. Additionally, a debate article from the Minister of Education commenting on the 2018 PISA results as well as a press release from the NAE are also included in the data.

Two factors seemed to coincide to make “the eleven percent issue” a major issue of national interest. Both schools and migration were high on political parties’ agendas during the years from 2018–2022. When these two factors become intertwined, as in the case of the 2018 PISA results, details, such as the eleven percent issue, can have great significance for the communicative discourses regarding education policy. When political parties suggest reforms, they need crises to motivate their reform suggestions (Nordin, 2014; Slater, 2015). Thus, some actors were interested in discussing both school and migration as big crises, while other actors, especially those in a position of responsibility, were more interested in discussing deficiencies as being possible to solve within ongoing policies—that is, with the proper policy proposals being in place within current systems. One side of the dispute used the excluded students as a fact to convince others that Swedish schools had big problems, while the other side used the PISA results as a fact to convince others that Swedish schools largely worked well. Both sides chose numbers (eleven percent and “above average”) as interactive elements to legitimize their standpoints, both to interpret the question at hand and to defend their standpoint against alternative meanings formulated by others. The seemingly technical question of whether a PISA test resulting from transnational cooperation can be considered satisfying or not exposed deep normative contradictions in society that primarily concerned the issue of immigrants and integration. A core question raised by this study is whether PISA tests primarily measure the quality of the school system or the demographic composition of the schools’ students.

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