Rasheen Booker studied sociology at university, intending to be a social worker, but after a year in the classroom he’s hooked on teaching. “This is what I’ve been put on this Earth for,” he says with all the enthusiasm of a true convert. Not that his introduction to the profession has been easy. Oglethorpe elementary school is in inner-city Atlanta, Georgia. “It’s under-resourced. It’s 100 per cent black, with near enough 100 per cent of kids on free lunches.” In addition, he was pitched straight in from his university, Morris Brown College, with only a five-week training course to prepare him.

But far from sinking under the problems of the neighbourhood, and his own inexperience, he has learned to swim strongly in the choppy waters of education. “I teach seven-year-olds. I chose that age because they’re not too babyish, nor are they too far gone. Last year, my kids did wonderfully. I had 19 students out of 21 reading on or above grade level. And they were so committed. If you ask my kids what word they’d use to describe themselves, they’d say ‘scholar’.”

Mr Booker also runs Oglethorpe’s after-school programmes, and knows that as a 27-year-old successful black man he is a crucial role model, especially for the boys, many of whom are growing up without a father at home, just as he did. “I try to be for them what I wanted from my teachers so bad, but which they never, ever were for me. I run an etiquette club for them. We do grooming, manners, eating, attitudes, self-esteem. We have a Dress For Your Best Wednesday. I tell them you should dress for how you feel. I am very, very big on self-esteem.”

Mr Booker is part of Teach for America, a controversial programme to crash-train some of the United States’ brightest young graduates and put them into the classrooms of struggling elementary, middle and high schools; it would be like the Department for Education recruiting hundreds of idealistic graduates each year from universities such as Oxbridge, Warwick and Nottingham, and sending them to Hackney, Toxteth, and the most deprived rural areas of the north-east and south-west. But unlike other fast tracks into teaching, this one targets people who aren’t necessarily thinking of it as a career, but who are willing to give two years to the poor children of their country in the same way that US Peace Corps volunteers work in developing countries.

The idea for this “teaching corps” was hatched 11 years ago by Wendy Kopp, a young Princeton graduate who wanted to make a difference and felt sure fellow high-fliers felt the same. Ms Kopp’s story of how she turned her ambitious plan into reality is now the subject of a book - One Day, All Children - recently published in the UK.

Getting her peers to teach in low-income schools would, she reasoned, not only inject energy and excellence into the places that needed it most, but also build up a core of movers and shakers who would afterwards carry a lifelong commitment to the education of poor children, whether they stayed in teaching or not. Ms Kopp had in mind people like Amina Osman, 23, who studied politics and government at the University of Maryland, but last September gave up a speech-writing internship at the White House to come to a school in a notorious housing project on the edge of Atlanta. “I’d been working on education policy, and I’d been reading a lot about it, but I wanted to know more than you can learn from books. And I already have. Where my school is, there’s only one way in and one way out. It’s all fenced in, and the homes are in a horseshoe, with the school in the middle.

“It’s what my principal calls a ‘juvarchy’, because it’s entirely run by young drug dealers. People can’t get a job if they live here because when they put down Bowen Homes as their address nobody wants them. Everyone’s young. The average age of parents is 26. There are no wise old grandparents. All the kids are black, and all of them live in the same kind of apartment. A lot of them have never even been downtown. They don’t benefit from diversity of any kind. An important part of my job is to try to build their imaginations.”

But this is not her only goal. “I teach fourth graders (nine-year-olds). At the beginning of the year a lot of them could not write a sentence. Only three out of 16 were even close to grade level. My aim is to have them all write a three-paragraph essay by the end of the year. I do everything by procedure and routine because that’s what these children need.

“I love my kids. I give them a lot of responsibility. I try to build on teamwork. I say to them, ‘I believe all of us can be a success. But if one of us fails, we all fail’. I don’t ever tell them they’re bad, I tell them I think they made a bad decision. Out of our whole fourth grade of 80, only 15 are likely to graduate high school. But I know that everybody in my class should.”

Wendy Kopp had a simple mission statement when she launched TfA - “One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” - and a simple plan for making it work. From her office in midtown New York - loaned to her by Union Carbide - she would drum up a vast classroom army, which she would train and disperse to the swamps, ghettoes and badlands of the US. But getting TfA started was far from easy. There was no money, no one trusted the green twentysomethings, and Ms Kopp’s naive enthusiasm almost ran the project into the ground.

Finding good volunteers was never a problem. Neither was finding understaffed school districts willing to pay them the same as other beginning teachers. But making sure the young graduates were effective, supporting them in their schools, organising their five-week summer training, finding funds, and fighting off their critics required a monumental amount of patience and energy.

The bad moments included summer training schools that turned into near riots because of poor organisation, and weeks when the bank account was bare. But Ms Kopp kept her eye on her mission statement and managed to get the project on to a sounder footing; Teach for America is now squarely on the educational map. This year, 1,700 corps members are in place in 15 different states and, in all, 8,000 young teachers have gone into schools from the Mississippi Delta to south-central Los Angeles, touching the lives of more than a million children.

Just how effective they have been has been a matter for vigorous debate in American education. Over the years the organisation has had to learn fast from its mistakes. It now clusters corps members together in schools, for mutual support. It drums into them the paramount importance of raising academic standards. And it has learned that new teachers are best supported and offered professional development not by TfA, but by the school districts that employ them. Many corps members work towards getting full teaching qualifications while they are doing their two years in the classroom, and just over half have stayed in education, with many becoming award-winning teachers or influential administrators.

Even so, TfA has run into fierce opposition from teacher trainers, who say the programme is patronising, that teachers cannot be trained in five weeks, and that teachers who are only committed for two years increase the instability in disadvantaged children’s lives. Linda Darling-Hammond of Columbia University, New York, the programme’s most vociferous critic, has accused corps members of doing more harm than good in schools where they have failed. “Even bright people who are enthusiastic about teaching cannot easily succeed without preparation, especially if they are assigned to work with children who need skilful teaching,” she says.

But Ms Kopp counters that three out of four school heads rate her corps members as better than beginning teachers, 85 per cent of corps members complete their allotted two years and, most significantly, “when you look at the figures for their impact on achievement, most are as good as, or better than, new teachers”.

Mary Hamadeh, a California middle head with wide experience of employing TfA members, says: “I don’t have any negative comments other than the fact that, as with all new teachers, we need to give them a lot of support with classroom management.”

Ms Kopp emphasises that most of these young teachers are not likely candidates for the standard certificate of education route. “These are people who’ve heard throughout their lives that if they are to fulfil their true potential, they should do anything but go into teaching.” In addition, the schools they go into are desperate for teachers, so any resentment from older teachers quickly dissipates.

Michael Harms, who graduated from Hobart College in New York just over a year ago, teaches fifth grade at Mariam Boyd elementary school in Warrentown, a small and isolated town in North Carolina, where “one-third of the way through our school year, the district still has vacancies. The greatest criticism I’ve heard of TfA members is that they’re not likely to stay beyond their two-year commitment.”

At the end of his first year teaching, some of his students had leapt three grade levels in their reading tests, but he is more excited by his success in encouraging his 10-year-olds to love reading. “One day, when we were reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (the American title), we had to stop part-way through an action-packed chapter. The following day, I learned that two of my students had become so captivated they had taken the book home and read the remainder of the chapter to each other over the phone.” Mr Harms cannot imagine how anyone can learn to be a teacher without being put in a classroom, and says his five-week TfA training, which did exactly that, taught him “flexibility, creative problem solving, and persistence”.

“We did long hours. It was 17 hours a day,” says Mark Williams, 23, who graduated in biology from the University of Delaware and now teaches a kindergarten class of 18 in South Seventeenth Street school in Newark, New Jersey. “You’re teaching in a summer school programme in the morning, then you’re in your own classes in the afternoon, then there’s more in the evening. It’s a little scary at first, but you work in teams and you get constant support.”

Even so, he found himself learning fast on the job. “My teaching style changed dramatically. I didn’t have a long-term goal at first. I wasn’t sure where I was taking them.” Yet, by the end of his first year of teaching, he had got 70 per cent of his students at or above the benchmark in school district tests, and like many of his fellow corps members knows that education has got into his blood. “I may not stay in teaching forever, I may go into professional development or something like that. But I now have a really strong sense of advocacy for low-income areas.”

One Day, All Children: the unlikely triumph of Teach for America and what I learned along the way by Wendy Kopp is published by PublicAffairs, pound;16.99 (UK distributor Plymbridge, 01752 202300)See Get Staffed, a guide to finding and keeping staff, in The TES next week