. If pubic education is supposed to "prepare" its students for real world work, or at least scoring a well paying white collar job, using openoffice is ABSOLUTELY detrimental to those students as they will lose a vitally needed skill in the office workspace: the knowledge and skills on using Microsoft Office programs. Love it or hate it, it IS the gold standard of office software. And if you don't know how to use the gold standard, that sucks.
But public education is finding it difficult to pay teachers and get the most fundamental supplies into the classroom. The cost of MS Office is expensive and I can understand the desire to get away from it for cost savings.
In addition, the collaborative nature of things like Google docs is going to become more and more the norm as time goes on. Papers and documents that are shared and can be edited and changed by all of the students with revision histories in case somebody decides to deface or screw up the original.
Today, MS Office is the prevalent office suite in the corporate world. But honestly, it's pretty simple to conquer all of the basic tasks, which are the only things that many office workers use anyway. The transition from Google Docs to Excel is not a mountain, I think most college graduates would be able to make the transition with relative ease upon landing a job that used MS Office.