Fox News Channel’s Todd Piro tore into President Joe Biden’s administration for trying to shift blame to the Trump administration for learning declines across the country.

During a segment Thursday on Fox & Friends, Piro and others excoriated White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for pushing what they called “egregious gaslighting.”

“Math and reading scores for America’s 9-year-olds fell dramatically during the first two years of the pandemic, according to a new federal study — offering an early glimpse of the sheer magnitude of the learning setbacks dealt to the nation’s children,” NPR reported.

“Reading scores saw their largest decrease in 30 years, while math scores had their first decrease in the history of the testing regimen behind the study, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Education Department,” the report added.

Below is a transcript of the exchange:

[Clip starts]
Jean-Pierre: “Let’s step back to where we were not too long ago when this president walked into this administration, how mismanaged the pandemic, the response to the pandemic was. (…) In less than six months our schools went from 46% open to nearly all of them being opened to full-time. That was the work of this president, in spite of Republicans not voting for the American Rescue Plan.”
[Clip ends]

DeANGELIS: “Joining the conversation all morning long, John Lonski and Todd Piro. Todd, your reaction to that, because it’s so amazing. Not only is she passing the buck again to President Trump there, but when it comes to all the spending the Democrats have done, oh no, it was the Paycheck Protection Program that really was the problem. They just keep doing this.”

PIRO: “Of all the gaslighting done by this administration, this is by far the most egregious. Let’s go back to what she just said. Schools went from 46% open to nearly all open. Well, you know where that all open came from? It came from the blue districts that were closed because they’re in the pocket of the teachers’ unions. Trump had nothing to do with that. Trump wanted to open it. Republicans wanted to open. So you can’t basically say we caused this problem, like the arsonist who puts out the fire. That doesn’t work. The American people see right through that.”

DeANGELIS: “John?”

LONSKI: “Remote learning was a total disaster, especially for primary school children who have a hard time paying attention to a computer screen over an extended period of time. And I’ll add, you know, a lot of these young kids, they haven’t been able to develop the ability to speak properly because they had these masks on when they came back to school and they couldn’t see lips move, and it’s from the movement of lips that they learn how to pronounce words. A lot of problems were associated not only with the lockdowns, but also with wearing masks forever.”

DeANGELIS: “You’re right. And the statistics are starting to indicate that.”

WATCH:

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