Several education projects launched under the Moon Jae-in administration's "K-New Deal," which aimed at digital transformation, have been halted outright or seen their budgets sharply cut as of 2026, losing the momentum needed to move forward. Critics say that even education policies requiring continuity over the long term have been scaled back or suspended after a change of government, undermining the sustainability and consistency of policy.
A review by Seoul Economic Daily on the 28th of the major education projects unveiled when the K-New Deal was announced found that a considerable number have been renamed or significantly reduced in scale.
The clearest example is the "Green Smart Future Schools" program. One of the 10 flagship K-New Deal tasks, it called for spending 18.5 trillion won over five years starting in 2021 to remodel some 1,400 schools that were more than 40 years old. But parents pushed back repeatedly because construction forced students to transfer to other schools or attend classes in prefabricated temporary classrooms. In 2021, Yeonhee Elementary School in Seoul decided to close temporarily after being designated a future school, then reversed the decision following parental opposition. That same year, 14 of the 57 schools designated in Seoul withdrew from the program, citing parental objections and other reasons.
The program was ultimately renamed the "Space Restructuring" project in 2024, and responsibility shifted from the Ministry of Education to metropolitan and provincial education offices. Its budget shrank to a total of 8.5301 trillion won over five years beginning in 2024, and a funding structure under which the central government covered 30% of project costs was changed so that local budgets bear the full amount.
Plans to build a "K-Edu Integrated Platform," regarded as the K-New Deal's core digital education project, have effectively been abandoned. The government had expanded the related budget from 389.2 billion won to 600.9 billion won to strengthen remote learning infrastructure after the spread of COVID-19. But the project was renamed the "Digital Teaching and Learning Platform" after the change of government and was scrapped in 2023 over questions about the return on investment, disagreements with education offices and maintenance costs. The prospect of needing tens of billions of won more each year to run cloud servers after the system was built also weighed on the decision.
There were also numerous cases in which existing projects were folded into the K-New Deal education agenda. One example is the drive to expand K-MOOC, an online learning platform in operation since 2015. Critics say that bundling existing policies under the broad K-New Deal umbrella, rather than developing new initiatives, inevitably left those projects vulnerable to changes in government or shifts in policy priorities.
Educators argue that policies requiring long-term investment, such as upgrading school facilities or building digital education infrastructure, need to maintain a consistent direction regardless of who is in power. If project structures and funding mechanisms change each time policy shifts, they say, confusion in schools and sunk costs will only grow. Yang Jung-ho, a professor of education at Sungkyunkwan University, said: "Among the Ministry of Education projects tied to the K-New Deal, programs like Green Smart Future Schools had plenty of problems even at the time because of parental opposition." He added: "Through changes of government and the like, attention and budgets dwindled, and it has effectively become a forgotten project."
