Looking Forward, Looking Back: Jackson Heights
By: Afroza Ahmed
With more than half of its residents being immigrants, Jackson Heights is seen as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in all of New York today. The neighborhood is situated amongst a large range of popular areas such as LaGuardia Airport, Queens Center Mall, Citi Field, and Flushing Meadow Parks. It is also relatively easy to get to Manhattan from this neighborhood (via 15 minute subway ride or car ride along the Queensboro bridge). With all the different trains that meet up at Jackson Heights, Roosevelt Avenue, their subway station is amongst the most populated in the entire system. The neighborhood mostly attracts low-income immigrant families of South Asian and Latin American descent. As popularity grows, interest in the unique fusion of enclaves heighten and bring rise to gentrification. As of now, the area stays relatively ungentrified of its current culture.
Unique to other neighborhoods that circle its identification on its enclaves, Jackson Heights is known by three different cultural nicknames – “Little India”, “Little Pakistan”, and “Little Colombia”. This is unusual as the nicknames of parts of an area usually exhibit one particular culture – a rule that Jackson Height blatantly ignores. This is a result of Jackson Heights’ very broad ethnic demographic. One may witness people of both Indian and Brazilian cultures scream out in pride whenever their country’s team is playing football (soccer). Once in the neighborhood, it becomes rare to hear the surrounding people speak solely English. The streets are lined with Halal Food Carts and Spanish food trucks offering handmade tacos and burritos. The barber shops in the Hispanic side of Jackson Heights will have vastly different hairstyles from those in the Indian side of Jackson Heights. Basically, this neighborhood is a what you would get if you were to mix prominent South Asian and American countries into the blender.
In this neighborhood, on 37-17 73rd St., lies a K-12 teaching center known as Khan’s Tutorial. Centered in an area with a large population of South Asian and South Americans, Khan’s Tutorial has made it its mission to focus on underrepresented minorities of the lower middle class and below. According to their official site, “Khan’s Tutorial (KT) is a tutoring academy founded in 1994 by Dr. Mansur Khan. Since then, Khan’s Tutorial has grown to 10 different locations. With over 250 highly trained instructors, KT is THE academy where students obtain the highest quality education at the lowest prices.” The tutorial first started out with Dr.Mansur Khan tutoring his son, Ivan Khan, and his friends to prepare them for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). Back in the 1990’s, underrepresented minorities had a very low chance of getting scores high enough on these exams to get into the prized Specialized High Schools. According to bkmag, only 4% of the students at all Specialized High Schools in the 1990s were Black or Hispanic. This has since changed over time and Khan’s Tutorial has been a large reason for that change.
Since 1994, Khan’s Tutorial claims to have helped over 2,610 students gain admission into these competitive schools. This year they were able to have “a record breaking 391 acceptances into Specialized High Schools”. In fact, 17% of Fall 2017’s incoming freshman class in Bronx High School of Science and 20% of Brooklyn Latin’s incoming freshman class will be made up of Khan’s Tutorial students. As seen in the New York Times article, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High School”, Khan’s Tutorial has made a great impact on the lives of underrepresented low-income minority families. Additionally, the work of Khan’s Tutorial has led to Bengali becoming the second most spoken non-English language in the homes of Specialized High School students.
Currently, the tutorial is working to offer scholarships, “the Dr.Mansur Khan SHSAT Opportunity Scholarship”, to underrepresented African Americans and Latinos that have excelled in their SHSAT classes at KT. By creating 9 more locations, several more programs (such as the High School Achievements Program and its upcoming nonprofit for mentoring future leaders) Khan’s hopes to continue to shave away at whatever is keeping minorities from achieving their best.
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“Providing Common Core, SHSAT, & High School Tutoring services to NYC for 22 years.” Khan’s Tutorial. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.
Santos, Fernanda. “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2012. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
“Elite NYC schools wrestle with drop in black, Hispanic students.” Al Jazeera America. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.
Iversen, Kristin, BK Mag Partner, Evan Romano, Sarah Zorn, and Juliann DiNicola. “Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem?” Brooklyn Magazine. N.p., 01 Apr. 2015. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.
