What are the relationships between the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and the core tenets of multicultural education? One way to evaluate the degree to which NCLB helps support goals consistent with multicultural education is to assess how teacher candidates are identified and prepared for teaching under the new "highly qualified teachers" provisions of the law. Now that the federal government has established the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, one can compare the highly qualified teacher credentials offered at the federal level with goals established by the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) and scholars of multicultural teacher education. In this article, the author looks more specifically at the legislation's "highly qualified teachers" language and compares the federal efforts to credential "highly qualified teachers" with the tenets Nieto (1995) and NAME have identified as critical to fostering educational equity and equality.