Understanding Social Change Social change has two overarching mechanisms in which to work with: changing laws and changing hearts. By changing laws, a governmental body can change a law in a way that allows for social change on the basis of legality. This can be thought of as a top down, or institutional approach to social change, because institutions, made up of comparatively few people that wield greater legal power, can mandate social rules for a much larger majority that wield significantly less power. In contrast, the people can come together and change their views as a group, and thus foster social change by changing themselves. Thus, bottom-up, or people-based approach, describes this method of social change because one group of people…show more content… Changing laws to promote equality works, however if peoples’ hearts lack transformation along with the laws, then “laws” will merely be another roadblock for privileged groups to continue their dominance. Support for this include failed examples of top down social change in education, such as the Central Little Rock, Kansas City Desegregation and Buck’s Acting White a successful bottom up social change example with the East Los Angles walkouts.
The Little Rock desegregation efforts in the 1950s provided an example of how poorly top down means of social change work to enhance equality. For starters, the United States Supreme Court found in 1954 ruled that the separate but equal doctrine established after the Plessy V Ferguson case denies minority groups the equal protection established by the fourteenth amendment, an example of top down change (Court Source). However, the Little Rock nine desegregation…show more content… In 1985, 31 years after the Brown V Board of Education case, a federal judge took control of the Kansas City school district due to the segregation still present in the school district. The judge pumped an enormous amount of money into the school districts to increase the quality of the schools in order to attract more white students into the schools. Unfortunately, after about fourteen years “the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged” (Ciotti, 1998). As with Little Rock, the people in power in Kansas City genuinely tried to promote equality, but since their implementation came from the top down their policies fell short of their goals. With Kansas City, the district simply “threw money into a given accounts” and did not set up implementation plans to effectively use the money, and thus there were no measures to make sure the money was being used to promote equality (Ciotii, 1998). If the school board, and surrounding community, had taken it upon themselves to promote equality, then they might have been more willing to make the money work towards education equity. Since they were simply handed the money, without any bottom up input, from a higher authority that improperly managed them,
