| Mississippi think tank wins national award for putting school data back in parents’ hands
Orlando, FL — The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has won the State Policy Network’s top communications award for Innovation in Marketing — for a campaign that took Mississippi’s school data out of the filing cabinet and put it in front of parents.
The award was presented on Monday evening at the State Policy Network’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. SPN is the national network of America’s state-based think tanks: 64 independent, nonpartisan state affiliates and more than 100 national partners working across all 50 states. Its Communications Excellence Awards recognize the best communications and marketing work across that network, and the Innovation in Marketing award goes to the organization that found a genuinely new way to reach, engage and empower an audience.
MCPP’s entry answered a simple question that Mississippi had made needlessly hard: how good is my child’s school, really?
The state publishes a mountain of official data on its schools. It is also scattered across a maze of reports, portals and databases that almost no working parent is ever going to dig through.
CompareMySchool.com pulls it into one place. Families can see how their child’s school compares with every other school in Mississippi. They can go further still — entering a child’s end-of-year grades and ACT score to see how that child compares with other students at the same school, across the district, and across the state.
Building the site was only half of it. MCPP paired the tool with a marketing campaign that has driven thousands of Mississippi families to use it — the part of the work the judges singled out.
“Parents shouldn’t have to become policy experts just to understand their children’s education options, especially when the information they need is already public — it’s just incredibly difficult to access,” said Anika Page, Director of Operations at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, who accepted the award on behalf of the organization.
“As a mom of three, with two school-aged children, this project is personal to me. We created Compare My School to give families the tools to find answers for themselves and make more informed decisions about their children’s education.”
The recognition comes as Mississippi continues a broader conversation about educational opportunity and school choice. While significant school choice legislation did not become law during the 2026 legislative session, MCPP believes giving families access to clear, useful information is an important part of empowering parents and informing future policy discussions.
Compare My School lets users search Mississippi schools, explore individual school information, and compare options side by side — turning complex public education data into a resource built for everyday use.
|
