With few exceptions, global and international education issues have not dominated the discourse or research on teacher education until recently. Merryfield (1995) notes that in the 1980s the National Governors Association called for teachers to be better prepared in global education and international studies, and in 1994 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education added a standard for accreditation that mandated preparation in these same areas. For teacher education programs that are struggling to meet new mandates for accountability linked to No Child Left Behind, along with enhanced state standards requiring strengthened context expertise, the emphasis on global education appears to be one more demand among competing agendas, a task made more complicated by declining state budgets. In this paper, the author briefly highlights several challenges that educators will need to address in preparing teachers to work in an increasingly multiracial, multicultural world and so help their students adapt to a more far-reaching global economic and political environment. These challenges--the heightened emphasis on knowledge production for a global economy, the political difficulties in developing a multinational curriculum, and the rapid rise of more complex cultural dynamics--will test teacher education programs more than ever. The choice is not whether global education should receive more attention but how it will be implemented to prepare citizens to live in a global environment that is simultaneously flatter and more fractured in its progress toward democratic ideals.