Depending upon your PHP version and host, the short tags could be disabled. They recently came back into use with PHP7, which is still in Release Candidate state.
What this means is that you might have to replace the short tags with the full <?php echo
use. Look in the generated HTML code on the client, to find out if this is the case.
One small thing I'd like to nitpick on, is your terminology. :P
You're not actually passing a variable to JavaScript from PHP, as much as you're using PHP to generate parts of said JS. It might seem trivial, but the difference is a crucial one. Passing the variable implies something being handled in the same program, which isn't the case at all here. The PHP code gets executed on the server side, which generates plain text output to the client. The client (web browsers) in turn parses said content, and figures out what kind of content the different part of this text actually is.
Having this clear mental separation in mind when developing web applications/sites will make it a lot easier for you to understand the details of how things work, and in turn make it easier for you to come up with clean and simple solutions that works as intended. :)