Despite the fact that most teacher education programs report that they have thoroughly incorporated diversity perspectives and multicultural content into the curriculum, external examinations often prove to the contrary. Likewise, synthesizers of the research on teacher education have consistently concluded that despite more than two decades of multicultural reform, little has really changed in the ways teachers are prepared in college- and university-based programs. Along related but somewhat different lines, institutional and governmental policies purportedly committed to the same goals of providing all children equal access to highly qualified teachers often turn out to be strikingly different from (and sometimes even diametrically opposed to) one another in implementation and ramifications. Discrepancies like these attest to the fact that there are dramatically different takes on "teacher preparation for diversity," "multicultural teacher education," and "teaching for social justice" as well as major disparities (sometimes even among people considered like-minded) in notions of "equity," "teacher learning," "social change," and "highly qualified" teachers for "all students." Given the importance of these issues and the multiple meanings noted above, this article suggests that rich conceptual frameworks are needed to help clarify differing underlying assumptions, sort out discrepancies between theory and practice, and analyze the ways they are entangled with competing political agendas. In this article, the author proposes a conceptual framework designed to accomplish these tasks, building its pieces through a series of interlocking figures and also sketching the "answer" to each of the key questions that is suggested by multicultural teacher education theory. The answers suggested by theory, however, are not necessarily (and sometimes not at all) the ones operating in actual teacher preparation policies, practices, and programs. Thus as she describes the framework, the author also illustrates in broad strokes some of the differences between multicultural teacher education theory and practice as well as some aspects of the range and variation among actual examples of policy and programs. (Contains 5 figures and 1 note.)