My parents would always meet with the principal before the school year started, to discuss who would be teaching my sister and me. They even got my sister tra

My parents would always meet with the principal before the school year started, to discuss who would be teaching my sister and me. They even got my sister transferred to a different teacher mid-year at one point, because she couldn't make it work with the teacher she had (I had had the same teacher myself incidentally; it wasn't that the teacher was bad, but that different teachers work better for different students). I can't speak for everywhere, of course, but my parents absolutely had a choice as to who would teach their children.