Tom Luce's rule for public policy fit in one sentence: "Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion," he told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in 2019. Luce, the Dallas lawyer and civic builder who helped reshape Texas education and founded a succession of policy organizations, died in July 2026.

CBS Texas reported his death, and Texas 2036 announced the passing of its founder and chairman emeritus. Former President George W. Bush, in a statement published by the George W. Bush Presidential Center, called Luce "a champion of education reform" and praised his belief in every child's capacity to read and succeed.

Luce's route to public life began in a University Park duplex, where he was raised by a single mother. He helped Highland Park High School win a state football championship in 1956 and attended Virginia Military Institute with financial help assembled by Dallas businessmen. After a year, he returned to Dallas, transferred to Southern Methodist University, studied accounting, and attended law school at night while working. He married Pam at 19, beginning a marriage of more than six decades.

Law first made Luce a behind-the-scenes problem solver. He built Hughes and Luce as its founding and managing partner and began representing Ross Perot while still leading a five-lawyer firm. The relationship lasted half a century and took Luce far beyond ordinary corporate practice. In 1982 he arranged a Pacific refueling stop aboard a container ship for Ross Perot Jr.'s helicopter flight around the world. Two years later, he arranged expert authentication of an early Magna Carta purchased for Perot and carried it home in the coat closet of a commercial flight.

Education became the pursuit that connected the rest of his career. As chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education in 1984, Luce helped turn statewide study into a major reform package. The experience also made him attentive to the work after a bill became law. In his Dallas Fed interview, he recalled that a ban on social promotion did not execute itself and said successful policy required careful rules, enforcement, and persistence.

He carried that focus into writing and government. Luce published Now or Never: How We Can Save Our Public Schools in 1995 and Do What Works in 2004. President Bush nominated him in 2005 as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education, and the Senate confirmed him on July 1. He later served as founding chief executive of the National Math and Science Initiative. The organization reported in 2026 that its work had reached more than 3 million students and trained more than 74,000 educators.

Luce kept building institutions as the issues widened. He helped plan and found the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute and served as its first chief executive. In 2016 he founded Texas 2036, naming it for the state's bicentennial and organizing its work around long-range data on education, health, infrastructure, natural resources, justice, and government performance. In his eighties, he also worked to connect North Texas education and workforce development with biotechnology.

The public work remained tied to family and place. Texas 2036 said Luce and Pam had three children and seven grandsons. When the Dallas Fed asked what future he wanted, he described a Texas where later generations could find a good education, afford a home, begin a career, build a business, and raise a family. That horizon explained his repeated investment in institutions designed to outlast their founder.

Texas still has the structures Luce assembled for that long view: the school accountability efforts he helped advance, two books arguing for proven practice, STEM classrooms supported by the National Math and Science Initiative, the policy capacity of the Meadows Institute, and Texas 2036's continuing store of public data. Together they show his preferred kind of civic achievement, built through evidence, coalitions, implementation, and patience.