President Bush was elected on a promise to end the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but his Justice Department seems determined to enforce it. That, anyway, is what we take away from the decision of the Justice Department yesterday to file a federal lawsuit accusing the city of New York of discrimination in its hiring process for firefighters. On one of the allegedly discriminatory tests, 85.6% of blacks who took it passed, and 92.8% of Hispanics who took it passed.

Our problem is not with making the Fire Department hiring process free of racial bias, or with making the city’s firefighters more broadly diverse and representative of the city. But most New Yorkers in need of assistance from a firefighter will care less what race the firefighter is and more whether he has the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to conduct an emergency rescue or put out a fire. It is these skills that the test was designed to measure, including questions like, “Immediately after using the power removal box to turn off the electrical power, a firefighter should: A. wait four minutes before calling the trainmaster B. begin evacuating passengers through the tunnel C. call the trainmaster and explain why the power was turned off D. touch the third rail to see if the electrical power has been turned off.”

If blacks and Hispanics do more poorly on this test than whites, it doesn’t logically follow that the test should be scrapped, any more than a lower black or Hispanic pass rate on the bar exam should mean that test for would-be lawyers should be scrapped, or a lower black or Hispanic graduation rate in the nation’s colleges should mean that higher education should be abolished. That is succumbing to low expectations, essentially throwing up one’s hands and suggesting that blacks and Hispanics can never become as proficient at such tests as whites.

Why not provide better preparation for the tests, rather than getting rid of them altogether? The federal government argues that the tests are not related to the job of a firefighter, but those jobs are increasingly complex and can involve knowing about chemicals, electricity, arson law, and expensive computerized equipment. The government has produced no evidence the test was designed with the intent of keeping minorities out of the Fire Department, or that the questions are in any way biased against minorities in their content.

It’s not as if, for instance, they all feature white victims in burning houses being victimized by black arsonists. The problem, rather, is “disparate impact.” But while getting rid of the test might help get more black and Hispanic firefighters, eliminating it might itself mean that the department has fewer Asian-American firefighters, which it already has even fewer of than blacks and Hispanics. Asian-Americans tend to do better on standardized tests, and eliminating the test might have a disparate impact on them.

When President Bush spoke of the soft bigotry of low expectations in respect of primary and secondary education, his remedy wasn’t to eliminate standardized tests in which minorities performed worse, but to require even more tests to measure performance while also adding money for tutoring and mandating school choice to introduce competition. What is called for in respect of the Fire Department is a similar approach, focused on meeting standards and raising them rather than discarding them.