Emily Lawson

Emily Lawson founded DC Prep in 2002 and led the growth of the organization from a single middle school to the highest-performing Charter Management Organization in the nation’s capital — today serving 1,900 students in preschool through 8th grade on five campuses. Emily’s work at DC Prep has been featured in The Washington Post and on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and has attracted the support of major national foundations focused on public education reform. In 2007, Emily completed the Broad Foundation’s Associate Residency in Urban Education. Prior to founding DC Prep, Emily worked for Victory Schools, a charter school management company in New York, as well as Academy of the Pacific Rim, a nationally-recognized charter school in Boston. Emily holds an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School and an MPA, with a focus on education, from the Kennedy School of Government. Her business career includes three years at The Boston Consulting Group and two years at the New York private equity firm, New Mountain Capital. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina where she was a Morehead Scholar. She is a native Washingtonian.