You're starting to see this across industries where their products and services are commoditized. Quite surprisingly, when the service / product turns into a commodity (due to competition), so does the customer (due to budgetary constraints)
If the school had purchased business-line PCs which are more suited to large organization use, they'd likely A. have gotten much better laptops, and B. gotten drastically better, on-site next day repairs.
But that costs about five times what they paid. So while I acknowledge, this situation sucks for the school, I kinda feel like we need to point out that they got what they paid for.
Cheap to buy, the machines have survived N years so by a Darwinian process any clunkers have been removed from the pool and they are built to a decent standard to start with. ChromeOS would imply cloud storage so students don't lose work &c. Depends on the use cases I imagine.
This. And then the Dell brand means the same as some OEM Chinese brand
And this is why Apple can charge what they charge per MB (even with all the shenanigans)