"So how might we reconfigure school so that students who are thes best are honored, become role models?" - RyanC

Maybe the answer is something like the high school I attended. It was created in response to Sputnik to encourage maximum student academic achievement, and it succeeded at that and more. The school day was divided into 15 minute modules of time. Classes varied in length from 1 to 6 modules. Lectures were typically 3 mods and held in lecture halls with as many as 180 students at a time. A typical literature class had 2 lectures and 2 small group discussions (10-15 students with one instructor) on different days. 

The result of all this apparent chaos is that cliques were hard to form and maintain, since each student had a unique schedule with unique breaks during the day. One other result was that we had the highest percentage of students go on to premier universities in the state.

That school was merged with another in '77 (end of boomer years) and mod scheduling ended.