A Class Apart

Suman Grewal and Katarina Käll are friends. Not best friends, the 14-year-old girls are quick to clarify, but good friends nonetheless. They attend Hjällboskolan, a school on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden's second-largest city, where the student body covers such a spectrum of backgrounds that headmaster Lars-Peter Ekenberg estimates more than 100 nationalities are represented. Suman, whose parents are from India, was born in Sweden. Katarina's family has been in Sweden for generations, but the same is not true of most of her classmates and friends. "I hang out mostly with them," she says. "The Swedish girls and immigrants have a...