I'm late to the party, I know. The short version is - I support the aforementioned suggestions of Fire and Samsung tablets.

The long version is - I used to work for a college a few years ago and we had a number of tablets students could sign out primarily for app development. We had around 40-50 Asus Nexus 7 tablets that were pretty bullet proof, and when they stopped being supported for OS updates after a couple years we replaced them with the entry level Fire tablets, which also ended up being pretty solid. I honestly don't remember any of these tablets having any issues, short of students mishandling them.

My major issue with Android devices, which rockstar_not has already mentioned but I think is worth mentioning again - there is almost zero incentive for tablet makers to keep the Android OS up to date on their devices - and this is almost entirely up to the manufacturer and not up to Google. Many Android tablets out there even receive zero updates in their lifetime! Bigger brands tend to be much better, such as Samsung, Asus, etc, but I personally have never seen any Android device last for as many OS updates as any Apple iPad.

Typically Apple will release at least 4 or 5 major OS updates through the lifespan of a device, which could result in dozens of minor iOS updates. As an example, the iPad Air 2 from 2014 can be updated from it's original iOS 8.1 to the latest iOS 15, which is 7 major OS updates or 41 minor updates. Because of this I've professionally and personally found that iDevices tend to be more usable for longer time than Android devices.

Just my 2 cents (Canadian cents of course, so only 1.62 US cents)

I work here