AERA URGENT REQUEST
All NCES Data Users with Restricted Use Licenses
March 14, 2025

AERA has just learned that all restricted-use NCES data licenses will be cancelled, possibly as early as March 20.

We urgently request that all AERA members and others in the research community with restricted-use licenses take the following two actions:

1. Respond immediately to the AERA survey set up for this purpose, whether you are a member or not. This will help us gather comprehensive information from users of NCES data with licenses for restricted data.
    
2. Contact your members of Congress—your House representative and your senators from both parties—and explicitly explain:

• The nature of your work with NCES data
• The specific restricted dataset(s) you access
• The specific work you are conducting
• How losing access would impact your immediate work
• How losing access would impact your future research and career
• The broader consequences of the loss of access to the country’s scientific enterprise and practitioners, policymakers, students, families, communities, and other end users of research.

This is a critical issue—your access could be cancelled as soon as next week. We are not communicating this lightly. The threat is credible and imminent. While we hope this will not come to pass, we strongly urge you to act now to help safeguard continued access.

Your action today could help protect your research tomorrow. If you have questions, please email govrelations@aera.net.

Sincerely,

Felice J. Levine, PhD (she/her)
Executive Director