Vouchers take the place of public schooling so that people can pay for charter schooling.
Vouchers are paid by taking money from public school taxes. This seems to be the trade-off for the prospect that the children of parents holding vouchers will perform well academically if they do not have to attend public schools but can choose to attend charter schools instead.
However, years of studies show that "private school vouchers may harm students who receive them." The most recent study reporting the same dismal results came in June from a proponent of school choice. See also here.
This calls into question the availability of insurance coverage for those who enable or even mandate such choices. Many kinds of insurance policies contain the equivalent of the Commercial General Liability or CGL "occurrence" definition, which many States including Florida equate with the standard CGL Exclusion 1:
There is to put it simply no coverage for an occurrence which is not an accident neither expected nor intended from the standpoint of the insured.
In the case of school vouchers, the relatively poor academic performance of voucherized students seems to qualify as an event that should not be covered by insurance. This has ramifications on several different fronts.
Hedge Funds and other Investors in Charter Schools, and Charter School Administrators. These people certainly have, or should carry, Errors and Omissions (E&O) or Directors and Officers (D&O) coverage or the equivalent. If they push vouchers knowing of their consequences at this time, there seems to be a real insurance coverage issue over whether their choices could even potentially be covered as accidents neither expected nor intended from their standpoint.
School Boards and School Board Members. Boards and their Members carry or should carry something like School Officials Professional Liability Policies, whatever the policies might be called. Putting aside questions of immunity, if any, there is still a very real question of whether School Boards and their Members can claim insurance coverage in the face of years of such poor test results that choosing vouchers for children may not be capable of an argument that such choices, again, are accidents neither expected nor intended from the standpoint of the insured.
"Known Loss Doctrine" proponents. Some judges and many lawyers have argued that insurance coverage is or should be "excluded" whenever the policyholder knows that a loss has happened for which the policyholder is now claiming coverage. There is rarely any such exclusion written in any insurance policy, but the argument is made often, usually by people who do not practice insurance coverage law.
Insurance is not available however unless there is a risk to be covered. In this situation, there does not seem to be much risk of the outcome with vouchers. Once vouchers are chosen, the outcome seems to follow. This may present another situation for the so-called "known loss doctrine," not as a supposed "exclusion" but simply because insurance arguably does not exist to cover known losses.
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