The Urban Institute report released last week was great news for the Academy of College and Career Exploration, one of the six innovation high schools in Baltimore found to be improving the academic performance of poor, minority kids. (The innovation schools are run with autonomy and in partnership with outside organizations. The new middle/high schools that Andres Alonso wants to open would run in a similar format.)

Now, there's something even better: Paul DiMatteo, who will be part of ACCE's first graduating class in the spring, has received an early admissions acceptance to Johns Hopkins University. As a "Baltimore scholar," his full tuition will be covered. Hopkins agreed in 2004 to cover the tuition of public school kids from the city who meet admissions requirements. But until now, all the students who have been accepted have been from Baltimore's selective high schools -- mostly City and Poly, which have admissions requirements. DiMatteo is the first from a city high school that anyone can attend. Marion Pines, one of the operators of ACCE (who also happens to be a senior fellow at Hopkins and is a former city housing official), said that "the whole school is dancing."

Paul, by the way, is one of the bloggers on the student-produced site News From Room 123. The blog has had a lot of interesting entries lately, including ACCE students' take on the Robert Poole bus incident, in which nine kids from Robert Poole Middle were charged with attacking a homeless woman and her boyfriend on an MTA bus. (Poole and ACCE share a building in Hampden.) There was also a heartbreaking entry last week by a boy whose house was raided by police looking for evidence against his brother in a murder investigation.