About five years ago, This American Life producer Chana Joffe-Walt began exploring her options for sending her child to public school in New York City. It turned out she had many: She could choose her local zoned school, or a magnet school, or a gifted program, or perhaps a language program. In order to decide, she started touring the schools, and quickly noticed she had something in common with virtually every other parent being guided through the halls: She was white. This was true even though the administrators giving the tours, and the children in the classrooms, were almost always people of color—with the exception of the gifted classrooms. They had the white kids…