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Students with disabilities (SWDs) in U.S. public schools face unique challenges that profoundly shape their educational experiences and transition into adulthood, such as lower academic achievement and higher rates of exclusionary discipline and juvenile justice involvement. These disparities have far-reaching implications, impacting high school graduation rates, college enrollment, and future employment prospects, thus perpetuating broader social and economic inequalities. Understanding what aspects of special education are conducive to learning and development for SWDs is important for identifying evidence-based strategies that can help improve educational experiences and outcomes for SWDs. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of effective educational practices for SWDs, by focusing on the roles and effectiveness of educators, and their interaction with classroom and school characteristics. Additionally, this research assesses the impact of discipline policy reforms, which grant educators greater discretion in administering school discipline, on learning and disciplinary outcomes for SWDs and non-SWDs. The overarching goal is to inform evidence-based education policies that support the academic and socio-emotional development of SWDs, ultimately fostering their successful transition into adulthood. The first chapter uses student-level administrative education data from North Carolina, linked to teachers and classrooms, and student fixed effects models, to estimate achievement returns to teacher preparation by classroom type and level of classroom support for SWDs. I find that SWDs perform better when placed in integrated classrooms and when these classrooms have co-teachers. Regardless of classroom type, SWDs benefit from more experienced teachers, but only gain from special education certified teachers in certain classroom configurations. These results indicate that education leaders can optimize resource allocation by minimizing separate classrooms for SWDs, relaxing special education certification requirements, and investing in an experienced teacher workforce with support from co-teachers. The second chapter uses incident-level administrative school disciplinary data and juvenile justice complaint records from North Carolina, to descriptively investigate how principal experience and supportive school environments for SWDs shape principal behaviors related to disciplinary removals and juvenile justice referrals for SWDs. The findings suggest that principals in schools with greater emphasis on integration, measured based on the share of SWDs spending most of their school day in integrated classrooms, tend to use more lenient disciplinary sanctions instead of removals from school. However, principals' disciplinary treatment of SWDs is not influenced by their level of experience or the extent to which SWDs are exposed to special education certified teachers. Most of these descriptive trends appear to be similar for principals' juvenile referral behaviors, but the associations with school and principal characteristics are not always statistically significant. These findings suggest that fostering integrated educational settings can promote fairness in school discipline for SWDs. Future research should explore the mechanisms driving this association to gain a better understanding of how to accurately leverage these insights to implement effective and equitable school discipline practices. The third chapter investigates the impact of North Carolina's 2011 discipline reform, which banned zero tolerance discipline approaches, on disciplinary and learning outcomes for students with and without disabilities. Using a difference-in-differences and triple differences approach, the study investigates the impact of the policy reform on students' likelihood of receiving out-of-school suspensions (OSS), in-school-suspensions (ISS), and disciplinary referrals, as well as their academic achievement in math and reading. Findings indicate a small decrease in OSS likelihood for non-SWDs following the reform, but no significant impact on OSS likelihood for SWDs or on disciplinary disparities between the two groups. Despite the minimal impact on disciplinary practices, the reform led to improvements in academic achievement for SWDs in both reading and math and reduced achievement gaps between SWDs and non-SWDs in both subjects. This suggests that disciplinary reforms may improve school climate for SWDs in ways beyond just a reduction in suspension likelihood. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]