Huriya Jabbar is an assistant professor in the Educational Policy and Planning program in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines the social and political dimensions of market-based reforms and privatization in education. She is currently studying school choice policy and school leaders' behavioral responses to competition; choice and decision-making in higher education; and teacher job choices, recruitment, and retention.

Her work has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Harvard Educational Review, Educational Administration Quarterly, and Educational Researcher. She is also affiliated with the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, where she continues to study issues related to school choice in New Orleans, and is a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Population Research Center at UT. She was a 2013 recipient of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and a 2016 NAED/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, which supported a study exploring teachers' job search processes, and the role of their social networks, in three charter-dense cities: New Orleans, Detroit, and San Antonio. Jabbar received a B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, and Ph.D in Education Policy, Organization, Measurement, & Evaluation from the University of California, Berkeley.