The Supreme Court will hear arguments today in a case that will determine whether city governments can continue to adopt plans to promote racially desegregated schools. Parents of white students in Seattle and Louisville sued their local school districts to challenge policies that considered race as a factor in determining what schools students attend. The Bush administration has backed the white parents. Meanwhile, many civil rights groups and other organizations have supported the school districts.

Ted Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: “The two cases that are in the Supreme Court are undergirded by an ideology that equates any race consciousness with racial discrimination, and in an Orwellian sense, even voluntary integration plans are perceived to be racially discriminatory. … What’s at issue here is this country’s promise made 50 years ago, 52 years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education.”

Some legal experts have said that if the Supreme Court sides with the white parents, it will indicate, from a constitutional law standpoint, that the country has given up on the racial integration of public schools. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1970.