The purpose of this study is to explore how PISA, as an international governing instrument, provokes the forming of different subgroups of actors, interests, and perspectives, communicating discourses on desired policy. The vivid national controversy over the Swedish PISA 2018 survey result, focusing on “the eleven percent” of excluded students, could, in other contexts, be considered a merely technical aspect of the conduct of the survey. The research questions are: What subsystems of actors shape the meaning of the discourses in the Swedish public debate on the 2018 PISA results? What normative background ideas and cognitive foreground ideas are communicated in the networks of heterogeneous actors, based on the PISA test as a policy instrument?  What kind of knowledge is valued most in education policy to succeed in PISA?