Maybe this is why Linden Lab has less interest in education

I can hear it now: 
XXX Linden:  "It's not a question of whether the educators will leave.  They are building their own infrastructure.  When they have it done, they will leave!"
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BTW, how close are they to having it done?   Here are a couple of reports on that:
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Education Discounts in Second Life: Loss or gain? – Hypergrid Business: 
" it was clear to me that it didn’t matter – this was no longer about Linden Lab. ... , while we were working in Second Life, we also mounted four inexpensive servers to run OpenSim, and to experiment with our own service provision. We have migrated content – and recreated it where necessary – from SL to our OpenSim world. We have 14 sims running, with 28,000 prims on each, and we have a few very talented developers who bring textures, sculpties, and scripting into our new world. And we are not alone."
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The infrastructure 
as surveyed by Maria Korolov
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How to choose an OpenSim hosting company – Hypergrid Business:

An excellent overview of the OpenSim world.  There are already OpenSim grids.  This article guides you in making your choices. 
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And, yes, people will want to connect to several different grids.  

There's a viewer for that.

The SecondLife Technologist: SecondLife(R) The Imprudence 1.4.0 Experimental Viewer

 "Imprudence is designed from the ground up as a multi-grid hopping product, and come's with about a dozen different and most popular OpenSim world logins preloaded."

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Imprudence not only connects with multiple grids.  It lets you save your work to your own computer.  Then you can upload it to another grid if that grid cooperates (InWorldz does). 
Previous:
http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.com/2010/10/reviews-of-sl-viewers-tpvs.html

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InWorldz. The first real threat to Second Life?
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You can even build your own sim on a USB stick
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OpenSim on a USB Stick: "Diva Distribution OpenSimulator install to a USB memory stick for Windows PC"

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A Virtual World in my Hands: Running OpenSim and Imprudence on a USB Key | Be Cunning and Full of Tricks
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Or as one educator said:
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We don't need Second Life any more.
We just need each other.
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But does Second Life need the educators? That is a question for Linden Lab to ponder.     
How to get into Second Life without really trying