When Joshua Graham flunked the Maryland Functional Math Test last year, Baltimore school officials invoked their tough new promotion policy, ordering him to repeat the eighth grade.

Joshua would receive special mathematics assistance at Chinquapin Middle School in Northeast Baltimore, officials reasoned, then be ready to move up.

But that's not what has happened, according to Joshua, 14, and his mother, Zeta Graham.

They want to know why he is spending all day in middle school taking courses he has mastered.

Why, of four classes -- including art, gym and social studies -- was only one a math course, until just recently, when Zeta Graham successfully clamored for a second?

"How is staying in eighth grade helping him?" Graham asked. "He still doesn't even have a steady math teacher [in one of the two courses]. He has a substitute."

"It's like a day of fun," her son said.

The Grahams' worries highlight what some city parents see as a glitch in the district's new promotion criteria.

Although public school children are being held to a much higher standard, if they miss the new mark, the city isn't necessarily doing what's best to help them.

Some pupils who were performing well were moved mistakenly to remedial courses, some parents said. Other parents complain that officials waited too long to assign lagging students to appropriate schools and programs.

Joshua Graham learned his fate in a letter two weeks before high school began, but many children were reassigned days or weeks after classes started.

Officials don't know the number of pupils reassigned after the school year began, but say it involves many. Although grades from this first semester's remedial courses won't be tabulated until January, school officials say the intervention programs appear to be working. Attendance is excellent, they say, and parents have been supportive.

But some parents of eighth-graders in particular say problems with intervention programs are hindering pupils at a pivotal point in their school careers --freshman year.

Eighth and ninth grades are known for being turbulent transitional years, when many students decide whether to stay through graduation. Education experts have long warned that students held back early in their high school years are more likely to drop out of school.

For eighth-graders such as Joshua who passed their classes last year but failed the functional math or reading tests, the school system prescribes an "enriched curriculum" with double doses of reading and math, according to Cassandra W. Jones, chief academic officer.

"The double dose has to be there," Jones said. "Our intention for those students is to get them to the point where they can pass" the tests.

Transition curriculum

For eighth-grade pupils who fail courses, officials two years ago created a midlevel between eighth and ninth grade called 9T -- an accelerated, transitional curriculum designed to help them catch up.

The program was largely considered a disappointment in its first year because many pupils were promoted to ninth grade although the accelerated work didn't help them pass core courses or state tests they previously had failed.

This year, students will meet all passing requirements, or they will be retained. No exceptions.

Most of the city's neighborhood high schools offer 9T programs, and this year nearly 800 students attend.

"We really do a child-by-child intervention plan," Jones said. "We use computer programs, we use manipulatives, various reading strategies. The whole purpose is we need to accelerate what the children need to learn."

By the end of next month, Jones said, many of the students in 9T programs are expected to pass the state exams they have failed. "Those students can be caught up and go on to 10th grade," Jones said.

Joshua Graham retook the functional math test again last month. Although he scored 20 points higher than before, his score still isn't high enough to pass.

Zeta Graham remains frustrated. She said she doesn't understand why the school system doesn't place students such as her son in 9T.

The program, she believes, would give him the concentrated help in the one subject Joshua isn't grasping. It also has the advantage of being administered in high school, allowing students to work in the setting where they belong.

"I understand that passing this [functional math] test is important," Graham said. "But my son is an average student. He passed his classes. He passed the writing and the reading functional [tests].

"Why can't he be in a high school preparing for this test? My concern is him remaining at a middle school -- where there's nothing in place for him -- when he belongs in a 9T transition."

Jones said she does not have enough information to comment on Joshua's case. She did say, however, that retained eighth-graders who are successful in their middle-school coursework may be eligible for the 9T program in a neighborhood high school in February.

"If the student has little or no success," she said, "he will be retained and repeat the eighth grade. He must reach the eighth-grade standards in order to be successful in grade nine."

The functional tests, Jones said, are a benchmark that can be used to determine if pupils are ready to move on.

"If students are unable to pass a test judged to be at the fifth- or sixth-grade level, interventions must be put in place to accelerate learning to prepare for future success," she said.

"Requiring students to pass the functionals prior to leaving middle school opens more opportunities for them to take higher level mathematics, science and English courses in high school."

But in their zeal to toughen promotion standards, some say, officials have cast too wide a net, catching kids who didn't need to be caught.

Ron Rivers' son was sent a letter Sept. 21 -- three weeks after the school year started -- telling him he was being removed from his regular coursework at Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School because he had failed English. That Monday, his son was placed in a 9T program.

Rivers took time off work to go to the school and the system's central office to investigate and discovered it was the system that had failed.

Returned to classes

His son hadn't failed English, and, after much back and forth, Rivers said, the youth was sent back to his normal classes.

"How long would it have been if I hadn't gone there and done that? Suppose I didn't have the mental facilities to know to do that?" Rivers said. "And even if they meant well by what they were doing, their execution was so bad."

Jones said such mistakes were corrected quickly.

"Those first three, four days of school, it's frustrating," Jones said, "but it's not detrimental to the child."

Graham said -- even though it's fairly late in the year -- she would prefer that her son be moved. That way he wouldn't be missing more time in important ninth-grade courses, such as English and history.

"I'm concerned because say he passes the functionals and he gets passed to the ninth-grade. Will he be prepared for the ninth grade? It seems to me that they already have it prepared for him to be held back again," she said.

It also would relieve Joshua of the need to explain to other pupils why he is back at Chinquapin.

"It's kinda embarrassing," he said. "A lot of them ask, 'Did you fail?' And it looks like we did because we have to come back to school every day and fit in with them.

"But I didn't fail. I passed all my classes. It's just one test and it's keeping me from passing to the ninth grade. I don't think that it's fair."