Yeah pretty much this. Google had a pretty successful effort to sell these devices as part of a managed solution: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-educati... Im guessing it was pretty easy for teachers (who they reached out to bypassing school procurement officers) or IT to manage.

Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though