In the early 90s, my primary school in "rural" Texas (45 minutes outside of Houston) got it's first computer lab. It had 30 Macs. Every class room had an ancient Apple (not sure what version at this point - IIe or III?).
Apple had BIG BIG discounts for education, that IBM did not. Even being a town outside of Houston, we never got Compaq PCs.
That said, once Win95 hit, EVERYTHING was swapped out for PC district wide. I remember my parents complaining that a new school tax was getting levied on our town to upgrade technology just a couple years after a previous one had already hit.
Education was the niche that kept Apple afloat back then -- they'd managed to make the Apple II the de facto standard for school computing, and when they wanted to transition schools to the Mac in the early '90s, they had to go so far as to design an Apple IIe on a card [1] to allow the Mac models they were offering to schools to remain compatible with the huge library of Apple II educational software.
They never succeeded in actually turning the Mac itself into the standard platform for school computing, and as you point out, once the Apple II platform was long in tooth, schools
began migrating in droves to Wintel boxes, and Apple's finances took a major hit.
Apple barely made it out of the '90s intact. They had a massive turnaround after Jobs returned, and are a major powerhouse today, but people forget just how marginal the Mac was in its early years.
Apple had BIG BIG discounts for education, that IBM did not. Even being a town outside of Houston, we never got Compaq PCs.
That said, once Win95 hit, EVERYTHING was swapped out for PC district wide. I remember my parents complaining that a new school tax was getting levied on our town to upgrade technology just a couple years after a previous one had already hit.