[jonknee]

For apples to apples you need to compare the fully loaded costs. One less IT guy on staff because of the ease of management pays for a lot of extra laptops. Elementary education doesn't seem to be the target though, so you may not see all the cost savings (simply keeping email and calendars up for a large organization can be time consuming).

[TomOfTTB]

I don't think it require one less IT person? As I said the use of Faronics Deep Freeze restores the default configuration every reboot. So the support costs are next to nothing.

As far as Elementary Education vs. Higher Learning I would be surprised if this took hold in Universities. The only advantage I could see is cost for students and with studies showing 70% of College Freshman having Macs (http://osxdaily.com/2010/08/05/70-of-college-freshman-use-ma...) I don't see kids settling for a Chromebook.