Despite Education Advances, a Host of Afghan School Woes Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times A student at Mir Ali Ahmad Girls School in Parwan Province, Afghanistan. Most girls drop out between sixth and ninth grades. SALANG, Afghanistan - There is not an ounce of fat on the wiry frame of Abdul Wahid, and no wonder. After he finishes his morning work shift, he walks 10 miles down mountain trails in northern Afghanistan to the first road, where he catches a bus for the last couple of miles to the teacher training institute in Salang. He walks back up the mountain another 10 miles to get home, arriving well after dark, just in time to rest up for his day job. In his determination to formally qualify as a teacher, Mr. Wahid, 33, exemplifies many of the gains for Afghan education in recent years. "It's worth it, because this is my future," he said. But he also personifies how far the efforts here have yet to go. Mr. Wahid's day job is being the principal of the high school in his village, Unamak. Though he has only a high school diploma, he is the best educated teacher that his 800 students have. It is widely accepted that demand among Afghans for better schooling - and the actual opportunity to attend, particularly for girls - is at its highest point in decades. For Western officials seeking to show a positive legacy from a dozen years of war and heavy investment in Afghanistan, improvements in education have provided welcome news. But for those who are working to make it happen - local Afghan officials, aid workers, teachers and students - there are concerns that much of the promise of improvement is going unfulfilled, and major problems are going unsolved. In interviews, they pointed out an abysmal dropout rate, widespread closings of schools in some areas of conflict and a very low level of education for those who do manage to find a seat in a class. Overcrowding is so bad that nearly all schools operate on split shifts, so students get a half-day, and many of them are on three shifts a day, meaning that those students get only three hours of instruction daily. And many children are not in school. Unicef estimated in 2012 that one in two school-age children did not attend at all. Further, while there has demonstrably been positive and rapid growth in the public school system, there have also been daunting challenges, particularly a lack of capacity to find or train qualified teachers, print enough textbooks or build enough safe schools. According to statistics compiled by Unicef, only 24 percent of Afghanistan's teachers are qualified under Afghan law, meaning they completed a two-year training course after high school. In many rural places, there are sometimes teachers with 10th-grade educations teaching 11th and 12th graders. Forty-five percent of the country's 13,000 schools operate without usable buildings, under tents or canvas lean-tos, or even just under the branches of a tree; in a country of harsh extremes of climate both in winter and in summer, that means many missed school days. The Afghan public school system has expanded immensely in recent years, buoyed by extensive international aid - the United States Agency for International Development alone has given $934 million to education programs over the past 12 years, according to the government agency. The education minister, Farouk Wardak, insists that 10.5 million students are enrolled this year, 40 percent of them girls, a huge increase from an estimate of 900,000 enrolled students, almost none of them girls, under Taliban rule in 2001. Those numbers are widely quoted by Afghan and Western officials as a marker of success, but the claims are seen as unsupportable by many here. Jennifer Rowell of CARE International, who has been conducting a study of education in Afghanistan, cautions that enrollment numbers are not actual attendance numbers. And she said that when CARE tried to contact the headmasters of schools around the country, using contact lists kept by the Education Ministry, "half to three-quarters of phone numbers of school masters were missing, or the man we call has not been in the job for years."