Research data for a third party that's easily traceable to a particular student can still violate FERPA law.

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FERPA protects education records and any information that can be used to identify a student. If research data can be traced back to a particular student, it counts as personally identifiable information. Sharing that data with a third party is a disclosure of education records to someone outside the school, which isn’t allowed without proper consent or a safeguarding exception. So even for research purposes, identifiable data should not be released unless you have written consent from the parent or eligible student, or the data have been properly de-identified or aggregated (or another permissible exception with safeguards is used). This is why the statement is true.