Since the turn of the millennium, PISA results have occupied a central position in political discourse across OECD nations, serving as a primary benchmark for evaluating educational quality and equality (Mertanen and Brunila 2024). These results provide a foundational basis for justifying various educational policy decisions (Bacchi, 2012). Previous research has analysed PISA testing both globally (Baroutsis and Lingard 2017, Hansen, Wallenius et al. 2020, Santos, Carvalho et al. 2022) and within the Finnish educational landscape (Säntti, Hansen et al. 2021), this article specifically investigates how Members of Parliament leverage PISA results to articulate and legitimize their policy positions.

The primary analytical framework for this research is Kenneth Burke’s (1969) dramatistic pentad, which conceptualizes linguistic action and rhetorical choices as dramatic instruments comprising five key elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. By deconstructing political discourse into these categories, the analysis reveals the underlying structures through which speakers seek to legitimize their perspectives in debate. Furthermore, this article aims to delineate the rhetorical mechanisms of guilt and scapegoating.

The analysis demonstrates that different political parties and ideological leanings are associated with distinct dramatistic configurations; some emphasize structural contexts and systemic constraints, while others prioritize individual responsibility and accountability. Consequently, actors perceived as heroes from one perspective are frequently framed as villains from another. Ultimately, these configurations serve to mobilize specific normative evaluations and policy priorities, thereby revealing implicit assumptions regarding the fundamental purposes of education.

Using the parlamenttisampo.fi open data resource, which contains comprehensive, structured access to Finnish parliamentary speeches I employ keyword-based extraction and SPARQL querying to compile a corpus of speeches that reference PISA, OECD assessments and conjugated finnish forms. The corpus is then subjected to a systematic burkean pentadic analysis, with each speech coded for the dramatistic elements of act, scene, agent, agency and purpose. The analysis proceeds through two interlinked research questions: 1. How is the meaning of PISA constructed in Finnish educational discourse through dramatistic configurations of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose? 2. How do dominant pentadic ratios function as competing rhetorical logics that allocate responsibility and legitimize particular educational policy trajectories? By focusing on pentadic ratios it is possible to uncover motivational logics underlying parliamentary rhetoric, revealing how certain interpretations of PISA outcomes foreground structural, individual, or normative explanations and thereby implicitly support different policy responses. For example, a scene–act emphasis might attribute changing PISA results to external socio-economic or global forces, whereas an agent–act emphasis may locate responsibility within specific actors like teachers or policymakers. These contrasting rhetorics articulate different visions of causality and political agency.

My findings possibly demonstrate that Finnish MPs do not merely reference PISA as a set of performance indicators but actively rhetorically constitute PISA as a political object for competing narratives of educational success, decline, equity, and governance. Different political parties and ideological dispositions are associated with distinct dramatistic configurations: some emphasise structural contexts and systemic constraints, while others prioritise individual responsibility and accountability. Heroes for others are seen as villains from different perspective. The analysis suggests that these configurations serve to mobilise particular normative evaluations and policy priorities. Furthermore, findings may suggest interconnection between language, motive, and policy justification, highlighting the ways in which parliamentary discourse both reflects and shapes broader cultural understandings of educational assessment and governance.

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