Numerous interventions – affecting law and policy – have targeted America’s entrenched achievement gap. Yet despite these efforts, poor, minority students still lag far behind their more affluent, white peers.

Fortunately, innovative organizations such as the nonprofit Teach For America (TFA) corps are standing – even flourishing – in the gap. Founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, then a freshly-minted Princeton graduate, TFA trains and dispatches teachers (committed to two years of teaching) into our country’s most troubled schools. In its inaugural year, TFA placed 500 teachers in disadvantaged communities; TFA teachers now number close to 5,000. Next year, some 3,700 new teachers will join the corps.

TFA’s mission to rectify educational injustice with a talented teaching corps is striking a chord with Generation Y. According to a May 14 Associated Press article, applications to join TFA this year were up by one-third. The organization is now the “largest employer of recent Duke graduates,” notes Duke Magazine. TFA is also the top employer of graduates from Emory, George Washington, Georgetown, New York University, and Spelman, according to yesterday’s New York Times. Competition to join the corps is fierce, says the New York Times article: “about 11 percent of the graduating class at Yale applied, 10 percent at Georgetown, and nine percent at Harvard.” Many will not make the grade. Last year, TFA accepted only one in six applicants.

Altruism isn’t the only force driving the professional aspirations of recent graduates. Many prospective employers recognize the value of the corps experience. TFA garnered the number 10 spot on Business Week’s list of “best places to launch a career.” CollegeGrad.com’s 2008 survey of the top 500 employers of college graduates ranked TFA sixth. And TFA chief Wendy Kopp made Time magazine’s just-released list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The media is swooning and the accolades are accumulating, but does TFA really work? New data, released this March from the Urban Institute, indicate that it does. The study, the first to examine the impact of the teaching corps on high school students, looked at test scores in North Carolina between 2000 and 2006. (More than 260 TFA teachers are currently working in Charlotte and in eastern North Carolina.) Students of TFA teachers outperformed their peers in core classroom subjects on End-of-Course tests, especially in science and math; the positive effect of TFA teachers was nearly three times that of traditional, more experienced teachers.

Not everyone is jumping on the TFA bandwagon, however; opposition has dogged the organization from the beginning. According to Time, Wendy Kopp’s professor at Princeton ridiculed her as “quite evidently deranged” for proposing a national teaching corps. Other opponents say the short two-year commitment wars against teacher retention. TFA counters with data showing 89 percent of corps members return for a second year of teaching, compared to only 82 percent of first-year teachers in poor communities. Jane Hannaway, one of the authors of the North Carolina study, also points out that being choosy (a key feature of TFA’s recruitment efforts) might matter more than retention: “School systems working to improve their neediest schools may find that focusing on teacher selection has a greater payoff in high schools than focusing on teacher retention.”

Critics also suggest TFA corps members are hampered by a lack of training. But by large measures, the on-site leaders who would know best – school principals – say TFA teachers are up to the task. According to a 2007 evaluation from Policy Studies Associates, 93 percent of principals said corps members’ training was “at least as good” as that of other beginning teachers; 63 percent said it was superior.

TFA isn’t a cure-all for our achievement gap malady. But it’s clearly part of the remedy. Besides, when it comes to boosting achievement among disadvantaged students, the ineffective strategies of the education establishment aren’t getting the job done. Innovation – along with more “deranged” ideas from visionaries like Wendy Kopp – just might.