Two separate data searches underlie this analysis of how references to educational research and to PISA are used in the Swedish education debate. Our data consists of 380 newspaper articles from the eight largest print media outlets in Sweden and 200 protocols from parliamentary debates (2000 to 2016) that made explicit references to “PISA” and/or to “educational research”. Based on a content analysis of this material, in which notions of policy borrowing and de-/legitimisation are central, we describe the result as a selective use of PISA data and of educational research in the education debate. PISA is used to legitimise selective (party political) solutions, and these solutions are oriented towards problems of teaching. The analysis also shows that politics and the media debate concerning education seems disinterested in educational research in a broader sense and that PISA seems to offer sufficient and ‘neutral’ expert knowledge and support for policy and reforms. When educational research is called for, it is a practice-oriented form of educational research with expectations to provide evidence to the PISA data on how to improve teaching and learning. The paper will show that PISA has become the first way to obtain legitimate support for educational reforms. In so doing, the kind of problems that these reforms aim to solve have been narrowed down to teaching- or practice-oriented problems.