"'The office of student services has disapproved your transfer request' because it would 'have an adverse effect on desegregation compliance.'"

Do you accept that... well, not you, you're a 5-year-old boy... should your mother accept that? Crystal Meredith did not, she sued, and the Supreme Court hears oral argument today:

Her lawyer, Teddy Gordon, says... it "is a pure quota," adding, "We've color coded children."...

To supporters of the Louisville plan, diversity is more important in early grades than it is in college. Opponents counter that there are other race-neutral ways of achieving diversity -- such as assignment by socio-economic status. In school surveys, however, Louisville parents have rejected that approach as too intrusive, since it would require that families supply the school board with personal information.

What the parents want is important, the school board says. It points to the fact that white students were fleeing the Louisville public schools by the thousands until the board adopted a plan in the mid-1980s that combined race-conscious student assignment with choice. Suddenly, school attendance stabilized....

PTA board member Mary Myers says the race-conscious assignment plan has also equalized school resources. "My children do not have to sit next to a white child to learn," she says, "but they need the resources of that school," and under this system, "they all get the same resources."...

The Bush administration and its former solicitor general, Ted Olson, point out though, that before 1954, racially segregated schools were highly popular too. "To deny people opportunities on the basis of race because you've been re-elected by a high popular vote just won't cut it under the Constitution," Olson says.

The Constitution, he adds, requires that the government be colorblind. It cannot discriminate to offset societal discrimination. Frank Mellen, the school board's lawyer, says that's simplistic since the Louisville plan is an evolution of what the federal courts ordered until just six years ago.

"It would be odd," he says, "if what was legally required one day by a desegregation decree becomes forbidden another day when the court dissolves the decree."

There's much more at the link, and plenty of discussion elsewhere on the web about today's tremendously important cases. (The second case is about the Seattle schools.) Please read the whole article. Your comments here will be better if you speak to the specific details to the case and understand the context, even if it is your inclination to answer the question with a bright, ideological rule. Keep in mind that Judge Alex Kozinski, a judge who is highly respected by conservatives, approved of the Seattle program, writing that it "is not meant to oppress minorities, nor does it have that effect. . . . There is no attempt to give members of particular races political power based on skin color. There is no competition between the races, and no race is given a preference over another."