K-12 educational outcomes are a powerful reflection of social opportunity, both by meaningfully predicting adult wellbeing across measures like health and income, and by encapsulating the breadth of factors that contribute to a child's preparedness, ability, and opportunity to learn and persist in school. In this light, the persistent deficits in educational outcomes experienced by individuals from traditionally disadvantaged identity groups and classes reflect systemic failures to meaningfully address the numerous shortcomings of education and social policy to create equal educational opportunities for all students. The three papers that comprise this dissertation aim to promote more equitable education and social policy by contributing valuable insights into three vital areas of policy that substantively shape the educational opportunities and outcomes of students in the United States. In the first, I extend the existing literature on how air pollutants can contribute to educational inequality by measuring the association between students' proximity to hog farms, their feces lagoons, and fecal fertilizer spraying, and educational outcomes in North Carolina. In the second, I examine the most important school-level resource for student achievement -- teachers -- and how the processes by which students are assigned to classrooms enables the disproportionate assignment of lower performing, nonwhite, and low-income students to less effective teachers within their schools. And finally, I examine districts' proposed spending of federal COVID-19 relief funds, what differences in spending strategies existed for these extremely flexible dollars, and what potential equity implications may exist for student academic learning recovery in the wake of the pandemic. Collectively, these papers contribute new knowledge in three important areas of education and social policy and foreground several promising future research directions by which greater educational equity and equality of social opportunity can be promoted. [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://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]