This qualitative and interpretative study sought to investigate and compare the meanings that families of different socioeconomic backgrounds attribute to the education and schooling of their children, and how this influences the families household budget. A total of 76 interviews were conducted with parents of 49 families from two distinct social strata: the new middle class (NMC) and the upper middle class. The NMC group was further subdivided into families enrolling their children in private and public schools in order to investigate differences within the new middle class. Altogether, four distinct groups of families emerged. The data indicate that almost all families seem to value education, but in different forms and intensities and guided by different logics. More importantly, these different logics and meanings substantively guide the household s spending hierarchy. Within the NMC, the logic of education and school diplomas as an instrument for competition in the labor market prevails. However, there are differences between the NMC groups studied. The first group, NMC families who enroll their children in private low-cost schools in suburban neighborhoods, seek a strategy of avoiding their children s conviviality with the deviant culture of the slums. Expenditures on education are considerable, but there is no great mobilization for the best educational opportunities for their children. The second group, formed predominantly by NMC slums families that invest in their children s education, are characterized by a strong mobilization around the schooling of their children, in the belief of quality education as a tool for social mobilization. School expenditures take on a huge centrality in household budgets and great sacrifices are made towards their children s education project. The third group, families with children in public schools, mainly living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, see school and complementary activities as important instruments to keep the minds of their children occupied and thus avoid the temptations of crime and other deviant behaviors that occur within the communities where they live. Although monetary expenditures on education are much lower in these families, the maintenance of children in school up to high school graduation, often with tolerance from parents for the requirement to work in parallel to their studies, represents a considerable investment in the form of abdication of additional labor income to the household. Finally, in the upper-middle-class families investigated here, education is highly valued, but the logic that governs the schooling of their children is much more pluralistic, and goes beyond the instrumental vision of the school, including also socializing and identity logics. Expenditures on education and extracurricular activities are very high and reach high proportions of household budgets, but rarely represent considerable sacrifices, since the discretionary incomes of these families are relatively much higher. A conjunction of structural and cultural factors are the basis for tentative explanations for the different views and logics of the schooling project of the children of these families.