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This article is situated in the context of recent policies for teacher quality in Australia. Discourses on quality have crossed many domains of public policy, including education. A feature of these discourses has been an emphasis on improving teacher quality and raising professional standards. The article uses critical discourse analysis to explore the implications of quality discourses for educational leadership. In so doing, it analyses how recent educational policies construct discourses on quality and professional standards, discourses which position educational leaders in particular - often contradictory - ways. Such positionings offer different ways of understanding leaders and how best they might lead for quality. The article concludes by raising questions about quality and leadership, questions that highlight the need to rethink educational leadership within a quality policy framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis of activists' and bureaucrats' politicking for gender policy in Australia demonstrates the utility of discourse analysis. Feminist policy initiatives are special: they challenge hegemony and they circulate counter discourse. Policy elites try to manage and discredit them. Traditional policy frameworks are used to identify policy with policy mechanisms, policy communities, value shifts and the like. But the use of policy discourse analysis for this Australian story elicits key strategies for constructing and managing a counter narrative and maintaining a counter public of outsiders using insiders to institutionalize gender policies even as equity and social justice value priorities recede. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]