As the number of after-school programs has expanded, states are increasingly interested in information that helps in the design, selection, and management of such programs. With the sponsorship of Stone Soup Child Care Programs in California, the RAND Child Policy Project and the Promising Practices Network was commissioned to measure adherence of the Stone Soup after-school programs to a set of recognized practices. This report details the three tasks involved in this evaluation. A literature review and meta-analysis were conducted to identify a set of good management practices for quality child care, and as a case study, the degree to which the Stone Soup programs adhered to these good practices was assessed. In accomplishing the first task, the research literature on after-school care was assessed to identify program or process elements shown to be associated with high-quality programs or with positive child outcomes. The synthesis of the literature highlights the almost total lack of solid evidence available about what management practices matter in providing quality after-school care. To accomplish the second task, a measurement methodology was developed to examine adherence to the list of 18 management practice standards derived from the meta-analysis. Data used to rate adherence were collected from 10 randomly chosen Stone Soup sites through surveys, supplemented by information from site visits. The third task was analyzing the data to derive an overall grade for the Stone Soup sites. The report includes examples of recommendations offered to the programs for improvement specific to each standard and describes limitations encountered in the use of the instrument and scale; caveats for their potential users are included. The report's three appendices list the publications reviewed for the meta-analysis, summarize the studies/reports reviewed, and contain the survey instruments used. (Contains 42 references.) (KB)