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Political appetite for neoliberal education policy has problematised teacher education in a number of countries, including Australia, the US and England. In Australia, dominant policy discourses of quality normalise the regulation and standardisation of teacher education and position teacher educators within a deficit model of education reform. Such positioning has been shown to have a deleterious impact on professional status, dismantling complex conceptualisations of teacher educators' work. Framed by key tenets of positioning theory and conceptualisations of policy enactment, this study investigated, using online semi-structured interviews, the ways in which 16 teacher educators in one Australian university positioned policy as "other", and the ways in which they felt they could or should respond. It found that teacher educators position policy, and engage in the policy process, in complex and varied ways. While many positioned policy as an intruder, with the potential to do harm to the profession, others had made choices that positioned policy as a tool for innovative imagining for programme renewal. Findings also highlight the potential appetite for collaborative positioning between policy makers and teacher educators as partners. These findings have significant implications for future approaches to re-shaping the teacher education policy space both in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be 'excellent', particularly for the higher education institution? Without a definitive answer to that question, university rankings have become a proxy for quality and excellence. As such, higher education institutions are continually seeking ways to improve their rankings, with the implication being that these rankings measure which universities are most excellent. Upper administrators from public four-year higher education institutions in the United States were surveyed regarding their perceptions of factors they considered most important when assessing quality in the higher education institution. Respondents rated graduation and retention as the most important indicator of quality. Survey results were further compared to methodologies of the US News and World Report rankings, Times Higher Education World University Rankings and Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings and found that the perceived quality factors identified by survey respondents did not align with methodologies for any of these three rankings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]