In English class my teacher handed out a summative. Twenty questions, two minutes, and one instruction at the top: read all the questions before you begin. I panicked and started answering. Question twenty said "flip over your page." That was the entire test, and I had not read it.
She was making a point about how easily reading goes wrong and how much depends on getting it right. It stuck with me.
Most reading failures are less funny than mine. Patient handouts are supposed to be written at a sixth grade level, and researchers who checked nearly thirty thousand of them found most were written well above the level recommended for them. When a document sits above the person holding it, they do not get a lesson at the end. They just miss what it said.
So I built LevelUp Reader. It rewrites any text to the reading level you pick, then measures the result and shows you the level it actually landed on, including when it falls short.
The best part was testing it. I built a diagnostic that told the model exactly which lever to move and by how much, then ran it against a control that just said "try again." The simple version won. That is a better result than the one I was hoping for, because now I know what is actually doing the work.
Right now it handles one passage at a time. The version I want is the one where a teacher assigns a single reading and every student opens it at their own level, and nobody stays up rewriting anything.
