Standardising policies are a feature of the teaching profession across many countries. In the decade following the release of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs), also called the Standards, a corpus of critical scholarship argued that the Standards constrain the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of teacher knowledge at the level of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and during teachers’ careers in schools. This scholarship also critiques the influences of the Standards on the public discourse about the profession. We argue that the literature critical of the Standards is concerned with shifting power configurations in relation to teacher knowledge – what is selected, who selects it, and how it is classified, distributed, transmitted and evaluated. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s (2000) concept of pedagogic discourse, we analyse the shifting power/knowledge configurations the Standards bring into teacher education, as depicted by critical scholars. We identify what critical scholarship has to say about the knowledge selectively appropriated, recontextualised and embedded into a regulative discourse to constitute the Standards. We also examine what alternative knowledges about teacher education are proposed by critical scholars. Our aims are to analyse the ways in which this scholarship depicts the regulative work or moral technologies of the Standards and to illustrate the struggles around teacher education knowledge.