I haven't read Johnson's book, but one thing to look at is which schools the grade inflation data is coming from, since the demographics has shifted since WWII, with the elite colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and so forth) actually having better students than previously. Case in point:
i am not sure how much the quality of the incoming classes ... has to do with the overall distribution of grades ... given that if more of the elite schools are skimming the top for the brighter students ... other institutions are having to "settle" for less able students and, their grade distributions should be going DOWNhill ... perhaps becoming more and more + skewed ... which i don't think is happening at all
to the best of my knowledge:
1. institutions really have no instructions to faculty on how to grade IN relation to the ability of the admitted students and
2. generally speaking, grading is totally within the domain of the teachers/professors/instructors ... and little pressure of any kind (except in rare cases) is placed on faculty to grade in any particular way
in addition, i doubt that the typical faculty member has any accurate idea of the distribution of SAT scores for their incoming students ... and, even if they knew that for the institution as a whole ... how could they know that for the students in their classes?
i think the major contributor to "grade inflation" is the deliberate or unconscious ... action on the part of faculty ... to NOT be as fussy about their grade cutoffs as they used to ... for a VARIETY of reasons ... (but having little to do with the "native" ability of the students in their classes)
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