Minority Status and Schooling in Canada JIM CUMMINS Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 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 educa- tional 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. Canada has always been characterized by cultural and linguistic diver- sity. This reality was acknowledged officially in 1971 by the declaration of a national policy of multiculturalism.The explicitly racist immigration policy that had effectively excluded most non-European-origin people was replaced in the late 1960s by a policy based on nonracial criteria. Cultural diversity in most major urban centers increased significantly during the past 25 years as increasing numbers of Asian and African Caribbean immigrants entered Canada under this new policy. During the past decade, immigration has increased dramatically such that close to 50 percent of the school population in major Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver have learned English as a second lan- guage. In 1985, 84,302 immigrants arrived in Canada, but this figure climbed steadily to a level of about 250,000 annually in the early 1990s. Figures for 1996 and 1997are estimated at about 220,000. Almost double the number of children under age 15 arrived in Canada between 1990 and 1995, compared to the number who arrived between 1984 and 1989 (estimated at 300,000, compared to 160,000). These immigration in- creases have been implemented as part of the federal government's strategy to combat the combined effects of low birth rates and a rapidly aging population. These increases in diversity are affecting not only the English school system but also the system of schools that serves francophone students outside of Quebec. For example, the French language school system in metropolitan Toronto is serving an increasingly multicultural student body, with wide divergence in the varieties of French that students bring to school (Gerin-Lajoie in press; Heller 1996). Anthropology 6 Education Quarterly 28(3):411-430. Copyright O 1997, American Anthropological Association.