More than 6,000 people were brought to the New Haven Green the other day by the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now to rally in support of “great schools for every child” and to complain that 40,000 children in the state are stuck in “failing schools.”

ConnCAN offered no prescription at the rally. But generally the group wants more “charter schools,” publicly funded schools that are largely beyond the control of municipal school boards andÓ — as indicated by a recent scandal in a charter school operation in Hartford — largely beyond the control and even oversight of anyone concerned about taxpayer money.

Charter schools are said to offer more opportunity to disadvantaged students. They also siphon away from regular schools the better students who have more engaged parents, thereby leaving “failing schools” more overwhelmed.

ConnCAN is suspected of wanting to undermine teacher unions. Days after its rally in New Haven the organization published a database of all public school teacher union contracts in the state, implying that education’s problems might be explained in those contracts.

This was fair enough in principle, since a big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it’s really not so public at all beyond the source of its funding. Alone of all government employees in the state, teachers enjoy exemption from disclosure of their performance evaluations, and more than other government agencies school systems avoid accountability by hiding behind the non sequitur that personnel matters can’t be discussed. So anything that distresses school administration may be deserved.

But like most educational prattle, ConnCAN itself is a dodge and a distraction from the cause of school underperformance. For schools aren’t really failing. Students are failing — particularly students who lack parenting, usually because they lack parents.

ConnCAN is really just another manifestation of the old trend in American education — the effort by conscientious parents to get their kids away from unparented kids. First it was the migration of the middle class to the suburbs. Now it’s the migration of middle-class kids away from regular public schools and into “charter” and “magnet” schools as suburban demographics and schools decline amid the ever-growing number of neglected kids and single-parent households.

Research cited in a long analysis written by Carl Chancellor of the Center for American Progress and Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, published in the November-December issue of the Washington Monthly, shows that disadvantaged children do best when they are fully integrated into society economically and geographically rather than just by race in school, the latter integration being the focus of education policy in many places, including Connecticut. For much learning and positive attitudes come from association with responsible peers and good examples generally, not just from teachers.

That is, disadvantaged kids do best educationally when they are dispersed, integrated among the middle and upper economic classes by land zoning policy as well as school districting — dispersed by life itself.

But good luck in persuading conscientious parents that more economic class integration won’t drag down their children’s schools. Indeed, Chancellor and Kahlenberg report that when half a school’s students qualify for lunch subsidies, everyone’s academic performance declines.

Liberalism used to boast that it was more interested in acting on the causes of problems than on their symptoms. But liberalism seems to have given up that principle when it comes to education.

For “failing schools” are mere symptoms. Their cause is the explosion of child neglect over the last half century, to the point that 40% of children in the United States now are born outside marriage, closer to 90% in cities, and thereby hustled toward poverty.

What caused that? Does it involve public policy? Where are the rallies against it?

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Mr. Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.