A significant amount of the computational time in large HMC simulations of lattice QCD is spent inverting the discrete Dirac operator. Unfortunately, traditional covariant finite difference discretizations of the Dirac operator present serious challenges for standard iterative methods. For interesting physical parameters, the discretized operator is large and ill-conditioned, and has random coefficients. More recently, adaptive algebraic multigrid (AMG) methods have been shown to be effective preconditioners for Wilson's discretization of the Dirac equation. This talk presents an alternate discretization of the Dirac operator based on least-squares finite elements. The discretization is systematically developed and physical properties of the resulting matrix system are discussed. Finally, numerical experiments are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive smoothed aggregation (αSA ) multigrid as a preconditioner for the discrete field equations resulting from applying the proposed least-squares FE formulation to a simplified test problem, the 2d Schwinger model of QED.