Many teachers...grading...for compliance - not for mastering course material

"A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material." -Dressel

Only if a teacher's pay or reward depends on the grade they give their students. Otherwise, it is treating teachers like professionals who worked hard to get where they are.

"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?"

Well it depends on what school is for. To be perfectly honest, I'd say that organization and scheduling my time properly and working hard are far more important in college and in the workplace than mastery of subject matter that's ultimately outside my career field. I don't use what I learned in Physics or Calculus or German at my job or in my life, but I need to be organized and schedule my time (work time and personal time) effectively on a daily basis.

"The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared."

I don't know if it's because they don't know the material or because they aren't able to adjust to working as hard or managing their time as effectively. From my perspective (entering college in 2005) it was generally the case that students had gotten used to skating by because they could get A-'s without trying and then ran into trouble in college, not that students who had worked hard but weren't as smart were getting too overwhelmed to get good grades. Personally, if I had gone into college with less material knowledge and better organizational/management skills, I'd wager my GPA would have been like a point higher or something.

Disclaimer: I was absolutely one of those "knew the material, scrambling to finish homework as the teacher was collecting it" types in HS, so my grades suffered relative to a purely "material mastery" metric.

"One of the problems with schools and our society in general is the idea that you can take something complicated and distill it down to a single, meaningful number. Another problem is the notion that you should even try to do this. We're taking this to ridiculous extremes."

I know that I didn't get into my (Top-25) college based on my High School GPA[1], and I know I got my current entry-level job despite my college GPA. Fortunately, the people evaluating the grades aren't using them as the only criteria.

"How hard is that?"

OK, but do that 150 times. And remember that one wrong word in that sentence is going to draw lawsuit threats or complaints to the principal/school board. You'll eventually be forced to fall back on pre-screened, buzzword-heavy, meaning-light phrases like many school districts currently have.

[1] - 9 people from my high school graduating class went to my college - #2 through #9 in the GPA ranking and me (#38, barely in the top 10%)

Agree that the question comes down to the purpose of school, and I think that's part of the problem. There's tension around what the actual ask is for students. Is school a force for teaching socialization and competence in the real world, or for learning academics. And should that learning be focused on practical knowledge, or on ways of thinking in general.

I think that's an issue at the core of a lot of the debates around evaluating both students and teachers. You can measure some of it really well, but much of it is on the "soft" side of things. You want to be able to quantify it in order to understand whether or not a student is actually progressing across a wide array of dimensions, but, by it's nature, it is hard to quantify.