Apple Lightning Charge/Sync Cable Fails

This past summer my school purchased and we implimented 1,200 brand new iPad 4's. Since then, we have probably had a 20% failure rate on the cables. This is extremely frustrating. My frustration drove me to try to find the issue. I decided to open a few of them up and see what's going on with them. I was very surprised to see that cables that quit working all had the exact same issue (unless extreme physical damage). The Redish-Brown wire inside the cable was broken about 1cm below the bottom of the lightning adapter. Some of these cables even appear to have burn residue at the break point of the wire.

My questions:

Is anyone else having these issues?

Shouldn't it be a recall on the cables? It's ALWAYS the same wire, unless extreme physcial damage.

Again, shouldn't it be a recall, at least as a fire hazard?

These cables are too expensive to replace.... Apple's education discount does so much for us (obviously sarcasm).