The development, implementation, and modification of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools' Quality Education/Racial Balance Policy of 1975 provides the case example of how experts and the specialized knowledge they employ are part of the educational politics of a postindustrial community. In the existing literature, there are competing perspectives about the relationship between knowledge and power in the policymaking process. One view holds that in contemporary society experts dominate. An opposing formulation contends that politicians control. In Montgomery County, a growing confluence of politics and expertise was observed: policymakers and experts are becoming more interdependent. The county voluntarily terminated its dual public school system following the Supreme Court's Brown decisions, but by the late 1960s, dramatic social changes occurred. As the population became increasingly heterogeneous, many down-county schools experienced growing concentrations of black students, resulting in community conflict and interracial tension. The school system and county residents sought to devise an integration policy to reverse this pattern, resolve the conflict, and ease the tension. The county's integration policy and its implementation resulted from a convergence of politics and expertise as the county's affluent and highly educated civic activists interacted with educational specialists, legal experts, and the school board. From its inception, the policy has been surrounded by conflict, including ideological shifts on the school board and community discontent. The interrelationship between politics and expertise fits no simple pattern, but policymakers and community groups clearly assume that experts and their knowledge are essential to educational policymaking. (Author/KH)