The United Arab Emirates (UAE) participates in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as part of a long-term strategy, starting with Vision 2021 and continuing with the recently announced UAE Centennial Plan 2071. These strategies set priorities of excellent education, a future-focused government, a diversified knowledge economy, and a happy and cohesive society (UAE, 2024). In the UAE, PISA participation is advocated for in government documents as creating “a complete transformation of the current education system” (UAE Ministry of Education, 2018). The UAE has consistently ranked low, and for the 2022 test, the UAE was ranked in the bottom half of the 81 participating countries for mathematics (43rd), reading (48th), and science (47th), with scores labeled significantly below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average for each section (OECD, 2023b). The Ministry of Education’s involvement in PISA has gone beyond understanding the students and is more aimed toward engaging with extensive global comparisons based on rankings with specific goals of rising in the PISA rankings. The UAE has invested heavily in PISA as the government enabled 24,600 students to participate in the 2022 PISA sample (OECD, 2023a).

The OECD publishes educational research based on the results of PISA, thereby continually increasing the visibility, scope, scale, and explanatory power of the assessment (Sellar & Lingard, 2014). This research tends to be secondary data analysis, technical analyses critiquing the constructs or bias, and impact or policy studies examining the influence of PISA on governance, policy borrowing, and accountability structures (Hopfenbeck et al., 2018). This study fits within that third category, analyzing the PISA results and connecting them with implications of relying on PISA for knowledge and policy guidance (Grek, 2010) also informed by comparative policy analysis using systems theory to understand policy borrowing influenced by Steiner-Khamsi (2014, 2004).

PISA demonstrates a culture of comparison that is intentionally disconnected from local policy, local context, and the idiosyncrasies of a particular place. Previous research has shown this to be problematic. The findings from PISA have created a constant stream of information about countries and education, primarily through comparison (Gulson et al., 2017). Significant research has found that context matters so much that global comparative quantitative research is rarely sufficient for solving local education problems (Crossley, 2014). In the UAE, Matsumoto (2019) has described the cultural mismatch that occurs as the UAE attempts to borrow education policy approaches from other countries. While the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries examine comparisons and draw conclusions about their schools, there is little explanation of the comparative data or guidance about the next steps for schools (Morgan, 2018).The UAE has specifically looked to Europe and the West to borrow education policy, even as they struggle to reconcile differences in values and loss of their own culture (Romanowski et al, 2018).

The PISA results compare every participating country on each part of the test, most often as a ranking. Various computed indices are compared in the results, and countries that do not fit the patterns are described in the accompanying text. This research was conducted by analyzing each mention of the UAE in the four main results documents for PISA 2022 to understand how the UAE is portrayed and the contextual information provided about the country. Critical thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2017) revealed the uniqueness of UAE schools, students, and PISA results.

The methods for this research were document analysis and analysis of my observations during the PISA Announcement of Results event for the UAE in December 2023. The four documents analyzed were PISA 2022 Results Volume I: The State of Learning and Equity in Education (OECD, 2023b), PISA 2022 Results Volume II: Learning During – and From – Disruption (OECD, 2023c), the UAE-specific document PISA 2022 Results: Factsheets-United Arab Emirates (OECD, 2023a), and PISA 2022: Insights and interpretations (Schleicher, 2023). A critical thematic analysis was conducted (Braun & Clarke, 2012) to develop themes based on how the documents portrayed the UAE. Every mention of the UAE in the documents was recorded to understand the UAE results and context. Excluded from the analysis were repeated mentions of the same information, tables or charts that included the data for all participating countries, methodology footnotes, and lists of many example countries without any other information. Retained in the analysis were instances when the UAE was mentioned alone or with a few other countries as a unique case to explain differences between a country and the results of others or to exemplify a pattern. After the exclusions, 70 mentions of the UAE were retained. Each mention of the UAE was paraphrased for the content of the mention, and the number of countries listed was noted. From these paraphrases emerged the sub-themes: school admissions, parents, student behavior, teachers, technology use, private schools, quality assurance, questionnaire sleepers, school autonomy, and performance gaps due to a gender gap, immigrant student gap, public vs. private schools, or socioeconomic status (SES). The main themes of results, school characteristics, and student characteristics emerged from these sub-themes. The mentions tend to demonstrate when the UAE differed notably from a trend, was unique compared to other countries, or was among the most notable participating countries.

Comparison is a prominent feature of PISA results data. The effect of this comparison has been described by many, including Sellar et al. (2017), as promoting a “global education race” through comparison and rankings. Considering the uniqueness of the UAE, the results potentially undermine the usefulness of PISA data, especially as it is presented primarily through comparisons. Generally, a country was mentioned in the results document to describe when it exemplified a trend or demonstrated something comparatively different from most countries. The UAE was often mentioned— comparably more than any other country—with clear indications of the UAE’s remarkable uniqueness. When data was presented in areas the UAE could hope to improve, it was often accompanied by an explanation about an idiosyncrasy of the UAE, indicating that what works in other countries would likely not apply. The uniqueness of the UAE makes PISA results of little use to future education policy decisions. Attempts to engage in policy borrowing, especially in an attempt to improve PISA scores, seem likely to fail. While the current discourse indicates that the UAE Ministry of Education intends to intensify its efforts to improve PISA scores, this includes consequences for teachers in the country, as noted by Morgan (2018). By continuing to rely on PISA to define education, policy options may be constrained while ignoring the UAE's uniqueness. This has the effect of potentially discarding policy options and reforms that could genuinely make a difference for the specific needs of the country, its students, and the country’s ambitions for the future. While the OECD originated as a primarily European collaboration based on economic progress for democratic countries, this has expanded to include countries like the UAE that aim to fit into comparisons like PISA, with goals of being seen as a major player in the world.

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