By all indicators, Raquel Torres should be cleaning houses. And that's only if she had stayed out of a drug gang.

Her parents were illegal immigrants from Tijuana. Neither had a high school diploma. Her father worked as a waiter, and she was raised in National City. She had trouble at El Toyon Elementary School because of her weak English.

Nearly one in four schoolchildren are foreign-born or the children of immigrants, and most are still moving up into the American dream. But a disturbing number with hardship backgrounds similar to Raquel's are not.

Many Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean islanders in particular have been stagnating compared to their parents. Worse, some peddle drugs and fall into an underclass of joblessness.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that roughly one-fifth of Latino males between the ages of 16 and 25 are high school dropouts and 3 percent are in jail.

But Torres was one of 50 children of immigrants tracked over 14 years who beat the odds to graduate from university and move solidly into the middle class. How did these 50 outliers ---- out of 5,200 who were surveyed ---- manage to do it? Did they have anything in common?

The lessons from Raquel and the others contradict the child-rearing and language-acquisition policies prevalent among educators, psychologists and politicians. They also suggest a need for more self-help involvement by Latino community leaders.

Instead of today's preached tolerance, the parents of Raquel and the other successful children were remarkably uniform in being authoritarian and stern, sometimes even employing corporal punishment, according to Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes, leader of the study.

As Raquel told researchers: "My parents ---- they brought us up very strict, very traditional. There was no argument. You just got the look and knew better than to insist."

Greater permissiveness may work for kids in safe suburbs, but greater restrictiveness keeps them off the streets in violent areas.

Instead of being fully Americanized in their school years, the 50 outliers also maintained their parents' language and cultural traditions. "Contrary to conventional wisdom, full Americanization has the effect of disconnecting youths from their parents and depriving them of a cultural reference point on which to ground their sense of self and their personal dignity," concluded the study.

The successful 50 still learned English and American ways. But this is where the schools, community groups and a "really significant other" came into play.

For Raquel, it was her elementary school English teachers in a bilingual program, the college volunteer who further tutored her, and Mr. Carranza.

A Vietnam vet and Mexican-American, he taught French at Sweetwater Senior High. He brought Raquel works of Chicano poetry and talked about college. College was impossible, Raquel had thought. Then Mr. Carranza pulled her mother aside at an open house. "Do you know that your daughter is very intelligent?" he said in Spanish.

"Really, my daughter?" the mother replied.

"Yes," Mr. Carranza said.

"All of a sudden, everything made sense to me; I was going to college," Raquel recalled.

She was awarded a bachelor's degree from the UC San Diego and a master's degree in education from San Diego State, and, at the time she was interviewed for the study, was working as an educational counselor for minority students.

She and the others, like all modern young people, grew independent from their immigrant parents, many of whom insist that their children go to college near home and not take out education loans. But she was personally grounded in asserting herself and deciding what advice to take from others.

So that more immigrant children are like Raquel, our schools and our local and national governments need to do more to promote involved teachers and counselors, work with parents and be supportive of their languages and customs. Learning English is crucial, but repeated studies show that by high school, students who are proficient in two languages academically outperform students who speak only English.

Meanwhile, all of us who mentored disadvantaged students when we were in college should know from Raquel that our time was not in vain. But as Raul Lomeli of Saber Es Poder (Knowledge Is Power) told me: "Hispanic groups lack the grass-roots structure to coordinate this kind of effort. The problem is a lack of money, lack of groups and lack of structures at the lowest levels." Our immigrant children are calling for your volunteer help.

EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS writes for the Washington Post Writers Group. Comment online at nctimes.com or contact him at edward.schumachermatos@yahoo.com.