I used to work in the NOC for a very large 80+ multi-site retail company that used Cisco 4400 WLC's. I can't remember the flavor of AP's. They worked fairly well, but had a few problems. They only had 1 controller at each site and failover was to another controller in the data center...over the MPLS cloud. Not a great design. A 2nd controller at each site probably would've been better. They often had AP's get saturated with 35 or 40 devices and performance degraded. The company tried to get Cisco wireless IP handsets working and it failed miserably. A Cisco wireless engineer worked on the issue and it was still a disaster. Roaming and audio quality in particular were a big issue. Last I knew, they abandoned Cisco wireless IP voice and used 900MHz Spectralink phones tied into the Cisco IP voice system. I'm not a Cisco wireless expert so I'm guessing there could've been a better design/setup to resolve some if not most of the issues.
I work for a different company now that uses Aerohive. I'm in charge of configuration and some of the deployment. We bought a pile of Aerohive gear for 15+ sites and we're replacing very old Cisco autonomous AP's with Aerohive. HiveManager has been very easy to centrally manage and monitor AP's for all the sites. We use a virtual appliance in our data center instead of their cloud HiveManager Online. I completely nuked the virtual appliance when I was trying to use some beta software. The AP's, RADIUS authentication, and everything else just kept running normally until I fixed it. The AP's don't depend on the virtual appliance at all. It's just for config pushes and monitoring. The monitoring isn't too shabby, but I'm a network engineer so I always think everyone's monitoring interface sucks.
I love the single interface for creating policies. The radio profiles give tons of options for load balancing clients between AP's, band steering, channel bonding, etc. With the help of Aerohive support we're running Microsoft Lync successfully over Aerohive. I can make a WiFi audio or video call with the new Lync 2013 mobile client and roam around our offices without losing audio/video. We have BYOD policies restricting internal network access. We also have guest access using their PPSK (Private Pre-Shared Key) solution. A single blanket PSK for a guest network is a bad security practice...users could decrypt eachothers traffic. Each client should have a different PSK. I love that the Aerohive solution can do that without heavy handed configuration. Multiple people at each office have access to the User Manager to create 1 day or 5 day PPSK's for guest access.
The local switching feature is nice with Aerohive. No more tunneling traffic back to a controller with bandwidth limitations and a single or dual point of failure. The only point of failure should be the AP...end of story. Cisco stuff can do HREAP to make a controller managed AP switch traffic locally but you lose roaming and authentication functionality with HREAP...it's listed right in their documentation:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10315/products_tech_note09186a0080736123.shtml
We also use the branch routers for VPN. Someone plugs in a BR100 or BR200 at home and can connect to a wired port or a wireless SSID and get an automatic VPN connection. Regular internet traffic doesn't go over the VPN with split tunnel routing. No more VPN software on PC's or phones. We have a few people that even use a 4G card instead of plugging in the router at home.
Aerohive support is great. Level 1 is out of Chicago and Level 2 out of California so I can actually understand what they're saying. I wish Cisco would stop outsourcing support to India. Most of the Cisco people out of India I've talked to seem fairly smart, but the accent is hard to get past.
For a school environment, take a look at Aerohive's TeacherView solution:
http://www.aerohive.com/products/applications/teacherview
It's included for free. I'm not aware of other wireless vendors that can do what TeacherView does without paying extra for a 3rd party solution. Aerohive seems to have alot of features packed into one product that you can't really get from the other guys without buying 3rd party stuff. Best of luck in your search!