More than 18,000 parents and kids marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Wednesday to demand equality — and excellence — in the city’s public schools.

They refuse to be ignored. They won’t accept the way the public-school system fails hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren — largely minority. They demand change now.

In time to make a difference for today’s kids, rather than writing off another generation, as Mayor de Blasio would do.

They don’t say charter schools are the only answer — but they’re a big one, and the mayor needs to stop fighting them.

The march followed a report showing how truly unequal the city’s schools are — “tracking” poor kids into rotten schools all the way from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Some parents testified to a better way. Zarida Teel denounced her daughter’s old school as a “failure factory”; Girls Prep Bronx charter, where she now goes, is “the school I always dreamed she would go to.”

Smart politicians respond to movements like this one. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., long a quiet booster of charters, declared that he’ll now “always be a supporter of charter schools.”

He called for City Hall’s current occupant to “treat [charters] equitably.”

Diaz is already mentioned as a possible mayoral challenger in 2017, as is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn), an outspoken charter fan for years now.

De Blasio, meanwhile, answered the rally with nonsense. “Look,” he said on WINS, “the vast majority of our kids — about 93, 94 percent of our kids — are in traditional public schools. We have to turn them around.”

That, right there, is Mr. Inequality ignoring the fact that the march was demanding equality. Lots of city schools work great — you just need the money to live in the right neighborhood.

If you don’t, your kids go to the failure factory — unless you win a scholarship to a Catholic or private school, or win a charter lottery. And the mayor and his allies would rather close down all those escape routes.

More mush from the mayor: “Our vision . . . is that every school is going to be brought up to the point of excellence.”

In fact, the “vision” he offered a few weeks ago amounted to tossing more cash at the failure factories, for add-on programs that, even if they somehow work, might deliver excellence only a few decades from now.

He’s offering nothing to today’s kids or today’s parents — and they’re not fooled.