Parties on all sides are in agreement over public school systems’ persistent failures to successfully engage and prepare all students, from coast to heartland to coast, for a healthy and productive adult life. While there may be help in charter and voucher-based programs, secrecy still threatens to undermine their good intentions.

Few things can be more galling for a FOIA requester than to patiently wait on a request for years, only to be told by an agency that if they don’t respond quickly and let the agency know they’re still interested, their request will be closed out. Here’s advice on how to handle these dubiously-legal practices.

As part of back-to-school week, we combed through the Central Intelligence Agency archives to find connections between colleges and the Agency, starting with our home turf: Boston.

Though you may not be able to get their plays, it can be pretty straight forward to see how much college coaches are paid.

Among the many terrible things that recently-pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio is known for is his years-long investigation into the legality of former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate by his “Cold Case Posse.” Emails regarding that investigation were released to Mike Davis earlier this year, and as ugly and dumb as you might have thought the whole thing was, turns out it’s even uglier and dumber.

Law enforcement have received heat for targeting protesters’ online posts, but schools also employ similar software to ensure students’ speech is also within their limits.

As hordes of white men with dopey haircuts take to the streets to denouce progress, it’s worth taking a look at a moment in American history when a bunch of rich dudes attempted to turn the country in a fascist dictatorship through overt violence, before they realized they could just hijack the electoral system - the story of General Smedley Darlington Butler and the Business Plot.

MuckRock’s been requesting registered dog data from towns across the country. In honor of National Dog Day, we took a peek at the prevalence of puppies in our home town.

A spreadsheet released to Brian Sparks shows that since 1982, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paid out a little over $66 million in federal flood insurance to government entities. That’s about a third of the cost of a single MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Whether it’s teenagers digging into a long-forgotten promise or a high school paper uncovering discrepancies in their principal’s credentials, students that learn how to use public records can punch well above their weight class in accountability and transparency. With our new Student Journalist FOIA Grant, MuckRock wants to help.

This Sunday, I will board a plane and fly to Bismarck, North Dakota once again. I am asking readers of MuckRock to contribute either their own voices to my research, or to connect me with folks in either of the Dakotas that may be willing to speak with me - particularly people who live either on Reservations or are connected to the Indigenous communities that protested for their water source and their continued survival.

For a long time, public records and the Freedom of Information Act were lumped in as the old way of doing things: Who has time to wait on a request that could takes weeks or months or years when digital journalists measure deadlines by the hours? How could photocopies of documents be relevant for an audience we’re told craves nothing but video?

The care rape victims receive is entirely dependent on where the crime occurred. Good sexual assault response policies are comprised of a number of initiatives, including (but not limited to) specific officer training, a victim-centered approach, access to victim advocates, guidelines for submitting kits to labs, and victim notification. Based on what we’ve seen in our reporting so far, we’ve rounded up a list of the five best - and the five worst - sexual assault response policies across the country.

The “hard line” that the CIA drew against GAO oversight in a 1994 would form the basis for their refusal to cooperate for years to come. When the House Committee on Government Reform held a hearing in 2001 regarding the Agency’s refusal to cooperate with Congressional inquiries, one Congressman criticized their approach as a “dated, distorted concept of oversight.” It was this concept, the Congressman argued, that led to the Agency’s refusal “to discuss its approaches to government-wide management reforms and fiscal accountability practices.”

Amid the literally hundred of government films preserved by the US National Archives are several cartoons. Some are good, some are bad, and a select few defy all rational explanation. Here are our favorite clips from that last category.

On February 16, 1976, the Village Voice went to press with an emblazoned “The Report on the CIA That President Ford Doesn’t Want You to Read.” Inside was a leaked copy on the findings of the Pike Committee, a lesser-known (and arguably more damning) companion to the Church Committee - and thanks to the Agency’s obsessive scrapbooking, you can read the full issue scanned into their declassified archives.

Included in the release of the NSA’s psychic research program is a document labeled “Chart Depicting Interaction/Dependencies Acting on Parapsychology.” The hand-drawn chart is the only thing in the document, and it looks awfully familiar …

With the resurgence of the American left, we wanted to see whether or not any agencies were tracking the 2017 May Day demonstrations. Documents we received from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis show that Antifa was specifically targeted and that DHS was sourcing its intelligence from a white supremacist website called “Occidental Dissent.”

Three years after initial request, the NSA finally hands over records related to its youth outreach program - just not the ones I asked for.

In 1994, CIA’s Director of Congressional Affairs wrote a memo to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) seeking, and receiving, affirmation of the Agency’s policy for dealing with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The memo not only spelled out the Agency’s “hard line approach” to the GAO, it made explicit the Agency’s intention to not to answer inquiries from the GAO that involve “so called “oversight” information.”

After Belle Plaine, Minnesota erected a memorial depicting a solider kneeling at a cross, the Satanic Temple proposed a memorial of their own own - and as recently released emails show, there was Hell to pay for the beleaguered city council.

Back in 2010, Deputy Chris Pratt of Denver Police’s Gang/Intelligence Unit got fed up with his department’s lack of operational knowledge regarding the threat posed by the vicious street gang known as “Juggalos.” Pratt put together a guide on the “fanatical followers” of Insane Clown Posse. And now, thanks to public records, you too can know what it means to be “down with the clown.”

After an exciting but relatively peaceful weekend of protesting, calm was restored to the city, and MuckRock awaits its latest requests for the official footage of the event.

Sometimes the most direct way to get the answers you want is through a rejection, and sometimes it’s through another agency entirely. In this week’s FOIA roundup, some great examples of creative and persistent requesting that overcame the odds to expose public scrutiny in hard-to-reach places. Plus, FOIA comedy.

At the same time that Robert Blum was helping shape National Security Council’s policies on covert psychological operations and paramilitary actions, Secretary of Defense Forrestal named Blum to the committee exploring the creation of the Armed Forces Security Agency - the direct predecessor to the NSA.