Family, school, and community partnerships are a critical part of student achievement, but the successful establishment of meaningful partnerships with low-income and minority populations remains elusive. In 1994, legislators in the United States passed a version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that seeks to address this challenge with the inclusion of several parental involvement mandates, including the development of a school-family compact in every school receiving Title I funding. This study combines critical discourse analysis with a corpus linguistic approach to examine such compacts in the Midwest region of the United States. The authors seek to understand how discourse in these documents contributes to the framing of family, school, and community partnerships and how the role of power is addressed within these compacts. Findings indicate that Title I compacts primarily reinforce hierarchical models of parental involvement and emphasize transactional encounters over and above partnership activity. A model of co-construction that fosters more authentic engagement is introduced as an alternative approach to current school-family compact development practices.