An interesting piece of information. Do you have an opinion on the reason for Turkey's success?
As far as the USCF is concerned here in the USA, I'm not holding my breath. It seems to me that the USCF is so political that it is incapable of doing common-sense things like benchmarking. If Goichberg can change that, great, but I'm not hopeful. I'll just keep trying to vote the bums out of office until someone finally gets it. (Unless I quit the USCF first in disgust.)
Sorry for the lingo. Benchmarking is just a fancy term for finding out who's the best, figuring out how they got to be the best, then copying their methods, if possible.
After I made my last post, I read the Chessbase article. It looks like the FIDE representative mentioned in the article (Makropoulos) contributed the success of the Turkish Chess Federation (TCF) to 2 reasons: 1) The TCF president (Ali Nihat Yazici) and his management, and 2) The politicians who support him. However, keep in mind that Makropoulos is himself a politician, so what would you expect him to say? I've heard only good things about Yazici, so that reason might be true. But I suspect the other reasons are more likely to be their push of getting chess into the primary schools, coupled with the near fanatic love of chess in that part of the world.
And to give the USCF a little credit, it is trying to ramp up the chess-in-schools program here in the USA. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I think at least half of the USCF members are scholastic players. (The adult membership has been steadily dropping in recent years.) But the USCF may have a tougher row to hoe than the TCF, because chess is loved less here in the states than in Turkey. (Kids here have more things to do to distract them from chess than in many other countries.) While I'm sure the USCF views the scholastic program as a cash cow, the sad fact is that almost all scholastic players drop out of chess after not too many years. So I'm far from convinced that chess-in-schools is the magic fix for the USA.
But if they haven't yet done it, I certainly wish that someone at the USCF would pick Yazici's brains for ideas that could be tried here. It couldn't hurt, and might even help. I'm just not holding my breath.