There’s no ambiguity about how many some school supporters feel about Sen. DiAnna Schimek’s proposed bill on their choice for education.

“Legislator wants to take homeschool law back to the ‘Dark Ages,’” blares a headline on the Web site of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Schimek herself admitted to getting the distinct impression after meeting with home school parents that there was nothing about her bill that they might be willing to accept.

Home schoolers’ antipathy toward Schimek’s LB1141 is understandable.

Approval of the bill would mean a huge change in home schooling in Nebraska.

Nebraska is now classified as “low-regulation” state by the Home School Legal Defense Association. Schimek’s proposal would make Nebraska only the seventh state in the association’s “high-regulation” category.

The bill would require annual standardized testing of home school children, or, alternatively, state approval of a lesson plan, diary or other written evidence of subjects taught and other educational activities, examples of student work and a home school assessment of progress.

If state officials decided that a progress has been unsatisfactory, they could require the child to be sent to an accredited school.

Home schooling in Nebraska has come a long way from the days when the current home school law was passed in an atmosphere of confrontation and acrimony, complete with a judge’s order padlocking a school where an unaccredited teacher was holding classes.

In Nebraska, there were 5,596 home school students last year. There were 904 in Lancaster County alone.

As Schimek says, there is little evidence on how well children are being educated in home schools.

But her bill goes much further than simply providing accountability and ensuring that home school children are receiving an adequate education. It sets up a system of state intervention. The dramatic change in the status quo seems unnecessarily onerous. The bill would even require that parents pay for the state testing.

A more reasonable approach would be to establish a simple requirement of annual testing and leave it at that. The test results could provide some benefit to students and parents by identifying problems that need to be addressed. The tests could offer some assurance to the rest of society that no home school students are slipping through the cracks.

State government should ante up for the cost of the testing. Home school parents already are saving taxpayers thousands of dollars each year by not sending their children to public schools.

A simple testing requirement would put Nebraska in the “moderate-regulation” category, according to the Home School Legal Association’s definition. That doesn’t seem like a return to the “Dark Ages.” A scaled-back version of Schimek’s proposal has merit.