In North Carolina, for example, state policymakers responded to the Great Recession by substantially reducing funding for teacher assistants, a decision driven in part by their belief that teacher assistants were not a cost-effective investment. Our recent study of teacher assistants in North Carolina elementary schools during the period 2001-2012, which includes the Great Recession, finds that teacher assistants boost academic outcomes for students, most clearly in reading. Thus, we used variation in these allocations over time within districts—along with a variety of additional controls for the characteristics of students, teachers, and local economic conditions—to estimate plausibly causal effects of TAs on student outcomes in elementary schools during our sample period.