In Johnson City, New York, the schools have sustained positive, meaningful educational change since 1964. The Johnson City schools have also given birth to the national movement of Outcome-Based Education (OBE). This book provides a cultural history of the relationship between community and school in school reform. The book describes the transformation of the town from an industrial community to a technologically based economy, from a school for future factory workers to an outcome-based education for all students. Data were drawn from historical document analysis, interviews, and observation. Following the foreword, preface, and introduction, chapter 1 examines the question of who benefits in and from schooling. Chapter 2 examines the cultural ground of Johnson City as one of the overlapping layers of the social-institutional context of the Johnson City schools. It describes how the cultural ground is developed in the economic history and industrial ethos of the Endicott Johnson Corporation. The third chapter establishes the social-contextual factors of demographics and size as they influenced the Johnson City schools and educational change in general. It also explores the ethos of International Business Machines (IBM) and its impact upon the schools. The centralization of the city's schools and the development of a new vision for the schools is examined in the fourth chapter. Chapter 5 probes the questions of who rules within a school district and with what justification as the struggle for power reshapes the praxis of the school leadership. Chapters 6 and 7 follow the development of the power/knowledge relationship in mastery learning and the shift in Johnson City schools from a paradigm of scarcity to one of synergy. The eighth chapter examines the inner layers of the social institutional context as school and community interrelate to shape a conception of power as a shared relationship, and examines how this discourse of power was facilitated in the leadership of the Johnson City schools. The process of staff development and its role in the development of a synergistic educational paradigm are described in the ninth chapter. Chapter 10 places the cultural analysis of the educational reform in Johnson City within the national context of OBE. It argues that the prospect for synergistic reform of schools relies on understanding of three significant aspects of schooling: the daily work of human action and language, ethical relationship, and the deep culture of the school community. Four figures, chapter end notes, and an index are included. (Contains 274 references.) (LMI)