Let’s hope it truly is about deletions and backing the federal government out of public education.

Now Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, who will lead the Senate and House education committees, are planning to push an overhaul of NCLB at a moment when backlash in the states has reached an all-time high, opening up new political windows to strip the federal role out of education.

The push to rewrite the country’s main K-12 education law will be “all about Congress taking a red pen and deleting” language, said Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former Education Department staffer.