This document examines eight factors perceived by the researchers to affect or explain individual and institutional behavior for a substantial number of schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs), especially in relation to current or projected knowledge production and utilization (KPU) activity. These "contextual conditions," representing the internal dynamics of SCDEs and their parent institutions of higher education (IHEs), are: (1) the tension between professorial self-actualization and the emphasis on institutional goals; (2) the weak bargaining position of the educational SCDE in the total university framework; (3) the absence, in a public, legal, professional sense, of a national system for the development of the educational profession; (4) the lack of an authoritative decision-making system, with the result that few agents can initiate or certify change unilaterally, while many can veto change; (5) the view that KPU activities must be considered complementary rather than integral to the SCDE mission of training educational personnel; (6) the lack of budget and resources to support institutional missions, programs, or activities in KPU; (7) the disparity between SCDE-faculty general noninvolvement in KPU activities and the desire and expectation to become involved; (8) the emphasis on research and scholarly writing for promotion and reward, causing stress (both intra- and supra-institutional) in fulfilling the SCDE's instructional missions. The balance of the document discusses these eight, and other less central, contextual factors in detail. (MB)