Appropriate ADC for educational project?

1. Basically, yes. With the questioned resolution, not for a CD audio quality.

2. A good explanation of decimation and other basic topics of signal processing is in U. Meyer-Baese, digital signal processing with fpga. It's often refering to Altera tools and FPGA. And the classical paper of the CIC inventor Hogenauer, EB, "An Economical Class of Digital Filters for Decimation and Interpolation," IEEE Transactions

on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ASSP-29(2): pp. 155-162, 1981

3. The most versatile audio converter covering the range from low rate to CD audio would be a programmable codec as utilized in many Altera and Terasic Dev Kits. It already includes decimation with an appropriate steep filter and outputs a serial audio data stream.