This paper presents sociological analysis of how school organizations define and operationalize their educational programmes, based on empirical data of discursive nature, collected through interviews with directors of clusters of public and private vocational schools, located in a city in the North of Portugal. The selection of programmes seems to reside in a strategic articulation - overdetermined by the central government as responsible for the national education policy - between education organizations and businesses, taking vocational education as the main reference. Assuming the theoretical contributions from sociology of work, sociology of education, sociology of classes and social stratification and sociology of youth, we seek to expose the factors, constraints, ideological assumptions, conceptions of education and school, motivations and strategic objectives of school organizations. The paper discusses the tensions resulting from the interaction between the national policy guidelines shaped by a New Right ideology and a complex demographic evolution that appear to stimulate a huge competitiveness between public and private organizations – and that relate to the nuclear dilemma of the modern school which is its role in the face of social inequalities.