Abstract: This dissertation explores the impact of educational policies on the public finance of elementary and secondary schools in the United States and on student outcomes in these schools. In the first chapter, I evaluate the impact of fiscal incentives on special education programs. In the second chapter, I ask whether school grade configurations have any effect on student outcomes. The first chapter examines whether incentives in the way special education is financed can account for the recent dramatic increase in student disability rates. Since some states allocate special education dollars to individual districts based on the number of special education students enrolled in each district, there is a financial incentive on the part of school administrators to inflate disability rolls. Using the case of a special education finance reform in California, I am able to overcome issues of endogeneity and identify the causal effect of these fiscal incentives on disability rates. I find that districts do, in fact, respond to these fiscal incentives by classifying more of their students as disabled than they would have in the absence of the incentives. Next, I ask whether or not increases in funding associated with these rising disability rates result in additional spending on special education programs by the receiving districts. Again, using the reform in California to deal with issues of endogeneity, I find that spending does increase with the additional influx of funds in the short run, but that spending is diverted to other needs in the longer run. The second chapter asks whether or not middle school grade configurations have an effect on students' smoking and drinking habits, drug use, sexual behavior, and dropout rates. An ongoing debate in the educational research community asks whether grade configurations cause improved student outcomes. This chapter provides an empirical answer to this debate. I compare eighth graders who attended sixth grade in a middle school system (K--5, 6--8, 9--12) to those who attended sixth grade in a junior high school system (K--6, 7--8, 9--12) in order to assess whether or not an extra year of secondary school as an adolescent results in better or worse outcomes. Because middle school students and junior high school students differ along a number of dimensions other than school grade configuration, I employ propensity score methods to form credible treatment and control groups. Using these methods, I argue that my findings are interpretable as causal estimates of the effect of grade configuration on student outcomes. I find that while an additional year of secondary school appears to result in increased probability of drug use, it does not affect any of the other selected outcomes.