Natalia Charron

About Natalia Charron

I design systems that test whether reasoning is legitimate — and I do that in two professional contexts that turn out to have more in common than they appear.By day I’m Dean of Instruction at a Title I charter school in Houston, where I lead a department of fifteen teachers across social studies, physics, and languages, and serve as campus testing coordinator. My background is in modern European cultural and political history — I did my graduate work at Princeton, with archival research in France — and that training shapes how I think about curriculum, assessment, and what it means to ask a question that actually requires someone to think.In parallel, I work as an AI evaluation designer and quality control specialist via Mercor, contributing to benchmark development for frontier language models. That work involves designing adversarial tasks that expose specific reasoning failures — building filter logic that collapses large candidate sets to single verifiable answers, anchoring tasks in primary sources with minimal web footprint, and stress-testing whether a model’s correct answer was reached legitimately. I also serve on a horizontal QC team, developing structured frameworks for evaluating task validity across bilingual annotation projects and escalating systematic patterns to project leads.The through-line is the same instinct: find the question that can’t be faked, build the rubric that catches the shortcut, and care about whether the reasoning actually holds.I’m also a published French-English translator with functional Spanish.

Experience

1. Dean of Instruction

   YES Prep Public Schools

   Jun 2023 — Present

   As Dean of Instruction, I oversee 15 courses and mentor, coach, evaluate, and manage teachers by:• Conducting weekly observations and evaluations using a rigorous instructional evaluation rubric and plan and implement weekly coaching conversations to foster instructional growth.• Serving as member of instructional leadership / academics team to set the instructional vision for the campus, outline instructional expectations, promote data-driven decision making, and hold teachers accountable to campus expectations• Collaborating with campus and district leadership teams to innovate, improve practices and systems, and refine curriculum• Creating and implement instructional professional development to improve instructional practice based on observation trends, research, and data.

Education

• The New School

  Bachelor's degree, Social and historical inquiry

  2004 — 2007

• Princeton University

  Master's degree, History (Modern Europe)

  2007 — 2009