Interesting Post on Reading-Level Scales—for Children’s and YA authors?

Here’s a post by Dennis Baron at The Web of Language about the readability scales used by various organizations to dictate the “grade-level” writers should aim for. He argues that these scales are useless, by virtue of the fact that they contradict each other, at the very least, and don’t provide help in creating “clear” language at any level. I’m not sure how these scales relate to the guidelines on language in children’s and YA books that writers in those genres follow. Check out the post, and let me know if you have used scales like these.