As some schools and colleges opt for in-person learning this fall, Paul Reville told Boston Public Radio on Thursday that even with concerns about COVID-19 spread in classrooms and dorms, society has to accept some level of risk in order to deliver its mandate to provide an education to people.

“We’re not sure what’s going to happen, but we’ve got to be vigilant and we’ve got to be able to react quickly if things start to get out of hand,” he said. “It’s all a matter of risk tolerance. The notion that we’re going to get to zero risk is just totally unrealistic, none of us have zero risk in our day to day lives.”

Reville is former Secretary of Education and a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education where he also runs the Education Redesign Lab. His latest book, co-authored with Elaine Weiss, is “Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty.”