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This paper seeks to answer whether or not rural-urban migrants "make it", i.e. whether or not they are able to, at least, achieve a socioeconomic and health status similar to that of their nonmigrant counterparts living in the same city. Using specifically collected data on ruralurban migration, this study finds that, after controlling for various characteristics, migrants' household incomes are significantly higher than those of nonmigrants. They also have a significantly lower probability to be absolutely poor than nonmigrants. Their health performance and that of their children are also no different from the health status of nonmigrants. There is only weak, and not robust, evidence that children of migrants have a higher probability of being significantly underweight. Their children's educational performances do not lag behind. In fact, for lifetime migrants, there is evidence that their children's educational attainments are significantly better than those of nonmigrants' children. Therefore it can be inferred that the process of rural-to-urban migration in Indonesia is not a harmful process. In fact, it has been found to be beneficial to the socioeconomic condition of the migrants. It is a way to provide a better life for poor rural people. To allow this process to happen naturally, the government needs to reduce unnecessary barriers to rural people who want to move to urban areas.

A wave of teacher retirement in Indonesia provides an opportunity to replace them with better-performing teachers. We study whether teacher candidates' screening tests into Pendidikan Profesi Guru (PPG) or Teacher Professional Education, a postgraduate education programme in Indonesia, can predict their performance at the end of the programme and in an actual classroom situation at the beginning of their teaching career. Using administrative data of 1,291 primary school teacher candidates, we find that admission criteria, including undergraduate grade point average (GPA), online admission tests, and interview scores, can predict a candidate's performance on their knowledge and teaching practice exams at the end of their education programme. A one standard deviation higher online admission test score is associated with a 0.30 standard deviation higher score in the knowledge examination. Teacher candidates with a one standard deviation higher interview score perform 0.07 standard deviation better on the teaching practice examination. For teacher candidates with one standard deviation higher undergraduate GPA, their knowledge examination performance is 0.15–0.17 standard deviation higher on average, and their teaching practice exam score is 0.06-0.07 standard deviation higher on average. We then estimate the predictive ability of the admission criteria on student learning outcomes in numeracy and literacy, which uses 1,530 randomly sampled students taught by 114 teacher candidates. We find no evidence that the selection criteria predicted student learning in a meaningful way. Our results contribute to a nascent body of research on the selection of teachers using ex-ante criteria to identify effective teachers in developing countries.

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Selecting good teachers is vital as it can lead to a pool of teachers who will continuously strive to improve their teaching quality. Therefore, strengthening the assessment tools for screening effective teachers at their point of entry into the profession is important to improving teaching quality. While abundant studies have been conducted on improving teacher screening strategies in developed countries, only few have examined the process in the contexts of developing countries. Our study aims to enrich the literature on improving teacher screening in developing countries by testing sixty-two teachers using a set of teacher assessment instruments that measure both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We discovered a significant and positive correlation between teacher competence in numeracy and student numeracy achievement. Furthermore, assessing teaching practices using a lesson demonstration is positively associated with students’ achievement. However, we found a significant but negative relationship between teacher competence in literacy and student literacy outcomes. We also reported a similar pattern in the correlation between teachers’ portfolio assessments and students’ learning outcomes. The negative correlation in literacy measurements may be explained by the difficulties experienced by teachers in Indonesia in translating their knowledge into practice, as there are no specific subjects designated to Indonesian language and reading comprehension. From a policy perspective, the government and education institutions can strengthen their teacher recruitment mechanisms by adopting instruments that can predict teacher effectiveness. Furthermore, these screening instruments should be combined with ex-post assessment tools as those assessments will provide a comprehensive overview of teacher capabilities, not only in terms of prospective teacher characteristics but also in terms of their actual classroom teaching performance after a certain period of teaching practice.