To what extent can we account for the educational achievement data of minority francophone, aboriginal, and African Canadian students using Ogbu's (1978, 1992) distinction between voluntary and involuntary minorities? While Ogbu's distinction is useful in highlighting the impact of status and power relations on student achievement, a more flexible and inclusive framework is needed to account for the variability of academic outcomes and to plan educational interventions that will challenge the way school failure is constructed. Academic growth among subordinated-group students will result only from educator-student interactions that actively promote collaborative relations of power and contest the still pervasive influence of coercive relations of power.