This article aims to unfold the narratives of success in the Modern, cosmopolitan society within transnational discourses. The narratives of success entail utopian desires of enabling "all" students to potentially become profitable for the economy and for themselves - accountable through mathematics proficiency. This reveals transnational desires with which all students are expected to excel in PISA, no matter their differences as humans and living conditions. Within this rhetoric, students become the only ones responsible for their own success and for their own failure.