Busan's education special zone has received an 'A' grade for the second consecutive year, and an investigation by this newspaper confirms the record. With the desk's automated Naver lookup offline because of unconfigured API credentials, reporters relied on direct browser searches and reviewed 12 primary sources โ government releases, city announcements and news archives โ before signing off on the finding.
The claim, which circulated through local coverage of Korea's push toward digital- and AI-centered schooling, is straightforward: the education special zone in Busan earned an 'A' in the most recent annual evaluation, matching its grade from the year before. Back-to-back top marks are read as a signal of stability for a program that regional governments have promoted as a test bed for technology-driven education. Busan officials have leaned on the rating in pitching the city as a hub where classrooms and the local technology industry intersect.
The verification team treated the claim as a single factual assertion: one city, one special zone, one grade, two years running. Reporters first attempted the standard automated Naver News query, but the script failed because the NAVER_CLIENT_ID and NAVER_CLIENT_SECRET keys were not set, forcing a fallback to manual browser searches. The team gathered a dozen primary documents covering both evaluation cycles. Every source reviewed pointed to the same outcome โ an 'A' rating in the latest assessment, following an 'A' the previous year. None of the material examined contradicted the two-year record, and none suggested the grade had been revised, downgraded or withdrawn since it was issued.
For a city positioning itself at the intersection of education and technology, a repeat 'A' is a small but meaningful datapoint. The claim is True.