In 2010, the California Early Learning Quality Improvement System (CAEL QIS) Advisory Committee recommended a structure for a voluntary quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) that could apply to the state's 11,000 licensed centers and 36,600 licensed family child care homes (FCCHs). The proposed design consisted of an unweighted block system with five tiers, in which all quality criteria in each tier must be met in order to obtain a rating at that tier. The rating structure provided for five quality elements: ratio and group size, teaching and learning, family involvement, staff education and training, and program leadership. The aim of this study was to conduct an initial examination of some key aspects of the proposed QRIS design. By capitalizing on two existing data sets that included some of the quality elements in the proposed QRIS rating design--one statewide and the other for a specific county--the work highlights some relationships among these quality elements, examines the ways in which different measures of these elements proposed in the QRIS design relate to each other, and provides information about the likely distribution of program-level ratings across the proposed rating tiers. This briefing provides California QRIS planners and other stakeholders with important information about some fundamentals of the proposed QRIS rating scheme that could inform California's QRIS design in advance of field-based pilot efforts. (Contains 3 footnotes.)